


The Roads Between Us

by mitchan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 14:17:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4266396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitchan/pseuds/mitchan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the night when Mary enters Sam's nursery to find the yellow-eyed demon, Azazel lets her live and gives her back the memories of the deal she made – and a warning: “Your baby is mine. And I will come for him one day.” Guilty, desperate, and driven by the need to save Sam from a dark fate, and protect John and Dean, Mary decides to go on one last hunt to kill the demon that threatens her son. She runs away with baby Sam, leaving John and Dean behind. </p><p>John becomes obsessed with finding Mary and Sam, and Dean grows up wild and lonely, with the infrequent company of a guardian angel who protects him, while Mary goes to her Campbell relatives for help and starts a hunt that will be much harder and longer than she expected. Sam grows up as a hunter, while Dean enlists in the army and serves in Afghanistan. And then one day in 2005, Dean comes back home to find his father missing, while on the other side of the country, Mary stops calling Sam...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Acknowledgements:
> 
> Thanks to my friend E.V., who introduced me to Supernatural, and was the best cheerleader from the beginning. He provided initial feedback, good ideas for the story, and BEER. All the platonic Dean/Cas in the story is dedicated to you!
> 
> I am also incredibly grateful to my betas: my sister Kin who took time out of her busy schedule to read the rough drafts several times and provide insightful advice on how to make it a better story (there would be so many more plotholes if it wasn't for her); and **darcydelaney** , who provided very quick, thorough, and helpful language corrections. My punctuation and prepositions would be much worse without her feedback. All remaining faults are my own. 
> 
> Finally, **chosenfire28** made truly amazing art for the fic. I am really happy that she chose to collaborate with me and make such awesome art! If you liked the art, go check the art post and give some love: http://chosenfire28.livejournal.com/297350.html
> 
> A lot of thanks to **wendy** for moderating this challenge and providing support all throughout the process!

 

 

 

 

Mary Winchester wakes up with a start, her heart beating madly in her chest. She can still feel an irrational terror coursing through her, although the images of the nightmare have already faded from her waking mind. It was something terrible and disturbing, but it's not the first time she's had bad nightmares, and it surely won't be the last.

She reaches blindly towards John in the bed, but finds his side is empty and cold. A wave of terror passes over her once more, but she reminds herself she went to bed early, John probably fell asleep downstairs, in front of the TV as usual. Then she hears a soft sound, like a quiet shuffling, and she sits up in bed, listening. The baby mobile is clinking in the nursery. It is rare these days for Sammy to wake up in the night, but it still happens, sometimes. She gets up and pads down the hall.

There is a shadow in the room, and something about it makes her muscles tense in response before she can consciously think of the reason. It looks like a man, his back to her, looking into Sammy's crib, and it must be John, who else could it be? But her body's tense and wary, energy thrumming through her veins, her hunter's instincts suddenly screaming danger.

“John?” she whispers, a cold feeling in her gut, the remains of the nightmare and the strange tension she now feels merging suddenly into a flash of pure fear.

And then the shadow turns around and stares with glowing, yellow eyes, and she freezes. Her mind is reeling, half-forgotten images returning to her, and she thinks, impossibly, _I know this man_. Her arms jerk as she tries to move, instinct unfreezing her body from the clutches of fear, but it's like a giant, invisible fist is gripping her tightly. She can't move.

The figure makes a sound, a soft whispered hiss, and he takes a step towards her, moving his face into the dim light of the hallway. Mary can't take her eyes away from the yellow eyes, which are now shining with amusement. The man's mouth seems to curve up in a smile. And then it hits her, out of nowhere, the memories reviving – those yellow eyes haunt her dreams, have done so for years now. It's the image that woke her up just moments ago. She's breathing fast and shallow now, and it's pure desperation that drives her to movement. She struggles vainly against the grip holding her, her muscles and tendons straining with the effort, sweat dropping down her body, and she can't move an inch, but she keeps on struggling, feeling her breath grow weaker.

The yellow-eyed man laughs a low, cold rumble of amusement. And it speaks, with a man's voice that is ordinary and yet inflected with a terrible power. “Mary, dear Mary. Even now you fight. I'm impressed. And still you refuse to remember! How unfortunate. I should remind you, then,” and the man gets closer, a breath away from Mary's face, and she can feel his cold breath and see his shining, distorted, glowing eyes, and she's sure he'll kill her, in that moment.

“I am here with your permission,” he whispers, and touches her face, his hand cold and clammy against her cheek.

And then she can't see, she can't feel anymore because her mind is reeling, taking her back without permission, without her direction, a whirlwind of images, flashes of feeling go through her, and it's too much, for a moment, for her mind to comprehend...

She feels herself taking sharp, deep breaths, and slowly, excruciatingly, her mind starts settling and piecing the images together, slotting them into the blurry, disjointed memories she had of the night she lost her parents. There's John on the ground, so young and precious, bleeding out, his eyes lifeless and his body limp in her arms. She can feel it as if it were happening in this instant, the utter despair she felt, like her own life's blood was draining away from her. She was losing the only thing she'd ever wanted, everything she'd ever hoped for, in that instant, and there was nothing she wouldn't have done to get John back. She listens in shock to the echoes of the next words, the pact she knew would bring nothing good, even though she knew she'd agree to it. She remembers feeling bitter for a long moment, completely cheated of all her choices, and John's dead body was so heavy, an unbearable weight in her arms, and she didn't speak a word. She put her lips on the cold, leering smile on her own father's face, and sealed the deal.

As she opens her eyes to see the smiling, yellow eyes, she remembers, and understands. She knows she's been denying this knowledge, this secret, for years now, but the truth is now leering before her face. This was all her doing. She'd said yes. She'd agreed to this and now something terrible is about to happen to her family, and it is all her fault. A wave of despair fills her, inside out, and her whole body gives up, goes limp, and she falls hard on her knees. For a second, there is only darkness and pain, and she wants to die.

The man – the creature – kneels before her, still smiling, and whispers in her ear. “It's all true, dear Mary. And you should know: your cute little baby is mine. I will come for him one day.”

Mary gasps, and clenches her fists, grits her teeth against the pain. “Don't you fucking touch my kids, you fucking-” she hisses, and the creature laughs, dark delight lighting up his eyes.

He moves his hand and Mary feels the invisible fist coming back, slamming her into the wall so hard it all goes black.

  


“Mary, Mary! What happened? Mary? Are you alright?” John's panicked voice comes as if from far away. She opens her eyes slowly, reluctantly. She's lying in the hallway before Sammy's nursery, and as she looks up, John's wide, concerned eyes meet her gaze. For a second, she wants to think she's waking up from a nightmare, another of those night terrors that make her start in her bed, her mouth open in a silent scream. But the pain stabs her awake. Her knees are bruised and hurt when she bends them. The back of her head hurts like she's been smashed with a sledgehammer. Her head's ringing and her thoughts are dull and confused.

She lets John help her up, still in a daze. “What happened, Mary? I heard a loud thump and when I came up, you were lying on the floor, passed out. Are you okay?”

Still embracing her, he touches her forehead, checking for a temperature. Mary stands in his arms for a moment, feeling numbed by the pain, but then she remembers, and gasps. She looks around sharply, but there is nobody else in the hallway. The rest of the house is silent. The sudden movement makes her nauseous, and she clutches John's arms to keep her balance.

She closes her eyes against the memories – the yellow eyes and the cold, hard words of promise, and the sudden cold fear in her gut erases all other feeling for a few moments. She runs into the nursery to check on the baby, John after her, whispering confused questions which Mary ignores.

Sammy's still in the crib, Mary notes with relief. He's awake, staring at her with that wide-eyed, curious look of his. More for her reassurance than his, she takes the baby in her arms and holds him close, feels him there, warm, safe, alive, unharmed. She's crying silently, tears running down her cheeks, and she  bends over to smell the baby's crown, always comforting and fragrant with that soft baby smell she loves.

The soft sweet smell of her baby is there still, but there's something else too, she realizes with a jolt like an electric shock. Her baby smells of sulfur, a smell that clings all over his small body, his blankets, and it's all Mary can do to keep from screaming. She lets out a hurt, terrified sound, and she feels her whole body trembling uncontrollably.

John is beside her in a second, taking the baby into his own arms, and he looks at Mary in shock, fear and confusion in his face. Mary hardly pays attention to him, because her mind is reeling with the thought – a demon. There was a demon in Sammy's nursery tonight, something cruel and powerful she's never heard of before, and he did something to her baby, and _she was the one who allowed it_. She gave her permission, many years ago, ignorant of the consequences, and now the day has come, it has happened. His last words come to her mind, repeating in an endless echo.

 _Your cute little baby is mine. I will come for him one day_.

“No,” the word tumbles out of her mouth in a whisper, a desperate plea.

“Mary! Mary, please tell me what's wrong,” John implores at her, but Mary isn't listening to him.

She's moving, even though her knees protest at every step and her head is throbbing, a dull pain that's getting sharper with each breath she takes. Quiet and quick she moves through the house, checking doors and windows. She finds a fine trace of sulfur underneath the nursery window, but not in the rest of the house. Her whole body is still trembling, the tears haven't yet dried on her cheeks, when she heads to the kitchen in a frantic rush. She opens several cabinets, panic making her clumsy, before she finds the salt, and on second thoughts she comes back, takes some herbs out of a cabinet, starts putting together protective amulets from rosemary, rue and everything she can find that she remembers is useful. She feels, rather than sees, John watching her silently as she rushes around the house, making salt lines at doors and windows, putting up the protective amulets in the main door and the back door.

“What are you doing, Mary?” John asks her at last, in a quiet, soft voice, like he doesn't want to upset her.

“Protection,” she bites out.

“Against what?” John asks, and Mary can tell by the tone of his voice, heard before during many arguments, that his patience is running thin.

Mary stops short, interrupting her panicked thoughts on holy water and stronger protective amulets and she's pretty sure there are sigils to keep demons away and trap them but _she doesn't remember_. The thought strikes her, _what do I tell John_?

The truth, even in her mind, sounds absurd. _A yellow-eyed demon came by the house tonight. I think it did something to the baby. I made a pact with that thing years ago, the night my parents died, your life in exchange for permission to come into our house_.

That sounds like a certain way of getting a one-way ticket to the mental hospital. Mary feels nauseous with the pain in her head, and the cold fear throbbing in her gut, showing no signs of abating anytime soon. She has no idea what to tell John. She's lost, like a little girl without her parents, no idea what to do.

 _I did it to save your life_ , John, she thinks, her mind carrying on absurdly with a conversation she definitely doesn't want to have.

But was that even true? Hadn't she done it for her own sake as much as his? She had clung to John as her way out of her family's clutches. He had been her salvation, her escape from the hunter's life, and into the normal, safe life she had always craved. If she hadn't done it, she would have nothing. No John, no Dean, no Sammy.

 _Oh, God. Sammy. That thing's coming back for him_.

She doesn't realize she's got her arms crossed in front of her, her body swaying gently from side to side, until she feels John's hands around her shoulders, leading her firmly away from the middle of the living room, up the stairs, into the bedroom. John sits her down on the bed and comes back a while later, with a full glass of water and a couple of small pills.

He hands them over to her and Mary stares at them.

“They're sleeping pills” John explains. “They'll help you sleep well tonight.” John's voice is soft and calming, the kind of voice he uses when Mary's nervous or upset.

“I don't need sleeping pills,” Mary replies, voice weak and weary. But John's voice is soothing, and he's looking at her with kind eyes, a soft smile, and is running circles through her back with his big, warm hand. For a moment she is tempted to take the pills, let them take over her panic, her guilt, and dissolve into a sleepless dream. And tomorrow... tomorrow she can pretend none of this ever happened.

The thought is ludicrous but she entertains it for a longer time than she probably should.

“Listen,” John starts, a bit hesitant, but he pushes on. “I know the last few months after the birth have been hard on you. Much harder than the first time. You haven't said, but... you don't sleep well, you have nightmares, you're restless and jumpy all day. I know it's something you don't talk about, but maybe it's time to... you know. See a specialist.” John's eyes are at their softest and kindest, trying to convince Mary to let it go, go to sleep, deal with it in the morning...

But she can't. Looking into his eyes now, his concerned expression, Mary realizes that John has already made up his mind about what happened. And she knows this about John: once he has made a decision, he sticks to it stubbornly, without logic or reason. He's already decided she's irrational, in a kind of paranoid streak caused by postpartum depression, and if she starts talking about yellow-eyed demons and hunting and protective amulets, he'll put her in a mental hospital, with a heavy heart but without doubting that it was for her own good.

She can't allow that, because without her, Sammy... and Dean, and John, will be unprotected, at the mercy of the demon who visited them tonight.

Mary turns around, pretends to take the pills, and drinks all the water. John is soothing and affectionate, whispering quiet words of comfort while he embraces her, trying to get her to sleep. Mary closes her eyes and evens out her breathing, and after a while – a very long while – John begins to snore softly beside her.

In the silence of the dark house, Mary thinks furiously.

This is her fault. She made that deal, bartering away her baby... A baby she didn't know then, but she does now. She's had months with Sammy, watching his curious eyes take everything in, comparing Sam's fussiness with Dean's relative quiet in the early days, realizing both her boys were different, wonderful human beings from the moment they were born...

She could never allow anything to happen to Sammy. And there is only one sure way out of it.

She'll go after the demon and kill it, get rid of it for good.

One last hunt for Mary Campbell. One last, big hunt.

Mary gets up, leaving John's embrace. She dresses quietly and takes out a duffel bag from the closet, packs light and quick. She's been saving money ever since Dean was born, a kind of unofficial college fund for her boys. There isn't much on the jam jar at the back of the shelf in the kitchen, but it will do for now.

Before she leaves, though, another thought stops her.

 _Sammy_.

What was done to him? Will he become a danger to the people around him? She remembers her father's stories about changelings and similar creatures. And that demon promised to come back for him. What if she isn't there when it happens, what if she's too late, what if she isn't fast enough hunting it and it comes back to her house when she isn't around?

What if the next time it comes into the nursery, it's John who finds it? Or, even worse, a terrible, chilling thought – what if it's Dean? Her bright, faithful, loving little boy, destroyed without a thought by the invisible force that held her captive.

It is too much to bear. She turns back up the stairs and enters the nursery. Sammy is fast asleep, and she packs his baby things into her duffel bag, before taking a big, warm blanket and picking up the baby ever so carefully.

She hesitates once again at the entrance. A part of her needs to go back, press a kiss to John's brow, and look at her little Dean one more time, tuck up his messy blankets, kiss his forehead goodbye. But she knows that if she turns back now, if she tries to say goodbye, God help her, she won't be able to gather the courage, the strength she needs to walk away from them.

Instead, she finds a pen and paper and scribbles down a hurried note.

_John,_

_I am so so sorry. I love you all. I always will. - M_

She grits her teeth and takes the few steps that will take her out of the house. Outside, the night is chilly, but the sky is clear and wide. The steps come easier as she walks briskly away from her house, her husband, and her little boy, as she turns her back on the happiest life she's ever led.

She's half afraid, and perhaps half-hopeful, that Sammy will wake up and start crying, rouse somebody, foil her plans. But safe and warm in his mother's arms, Sam sleeps peacefully.

 

 


	2. Chapter 1

 

John stared out the kitchen window into the yard. Dean was outside, but he wasn't playing. He sat there, surrounded by his toy cars, and stared out into the distance, silent and unmoving. Like he was waiting. Waiting for his mother to come back. John knew exactly how he felt.

He stared once again at the bottle of Jack Daniels he'd found while going through the contents of the pantry. It was at least three-quarters empty and covered in a layer of dust, abandoned since the time he'd promised Mary to stop drinking. For a year and a half, he'd kept his promise religiously. However, Mary wasn't there anymore, and the drink sloshing at the bottom of the bottle looked more tempting by the day.

He'd just come back from the police station, and like yesterday and the day before that, there were no news. The clerk at the bus station recalled seeing her with a baby on the night of Wednesday, November 2, around 4 am, when she'd boarded a bus heading for Kansas City. The bus driver had been questioned, and said she had left the bus in Kansas City station with the rest of the passengers. Apparently she had boarded no other buses, she hadn't taken a taxi, and she hadn't rented a car. The trail had gone cold after a few weeks, and the police, John thought, hadn't made much of an effort to find her. John had explained again and again that Mary hadn't been herself that night, he told the police about her strange and panicked behavior, his worry for her wellbeing as well as the baby's. The officers nodded politely and assured him they were doing all they could, they'd sent notices to all the closest counties and states, they were on the lookout for her.

“She'll come back. You'll see,” Mike had assured him, like the previous times he and Mary had been in a nasty fight.

But more than a month had passed already. He still carried her note in his pocket, worn thin with use from all the times John took it out, read it, and put it back again. He couldn't make sense of it, and perhaps that was the worst part. He had no idea what brought this on, what went through her head the night she left with Sammy. Had it been his fault? Had it been something that had been brewing for months, that he should have noticed? She seemed to be doing fine to him, but then... this happened.

Dean played with his cars, moving them through the grass, but his usually energetic little body moved sluggishly. He wasn't making loud noises or babbling to himself as he played, as usual. He was silent and paused frequently, stopping his game and staring off into the distance.

 _Dean needs his Mama and his baby brother_ , John thought. _I can't let him grow up without them_.

He took the bottle and put it back in the pantry, closing it with a decisive bang. If the police had stopped looking, he wouldn't. He wouldn't give up. He was going to find Mary, and bring her home.

 

 

Over the next few weeks, John got a babysitter for Dean and spent several weekends in Kansas City, walking around the bus station talking to the clerks, the drivers, the cleaning staff. He chased down vague leads like a sighting in the parking lot, someone who saw a blond woman boarding a bus towards the south, even a report on a carjacking that happened not far from the station.

Back in Lawrence, he stripped the house down, combing every inch for any kind of clue – what he was looking for exactly, he didn't know. There were no drugs in the house that would explain Mary's altered state of mind that night. He went through her address book, calling every number listed, but nothing came up. Her parents were dead. John had briefly met her uncle Robert on their wedding day, but he couldn't find his address or phone number anywhere.

In that moment, John realized that Mary hadn't kept anything from her past. There were many flowing dresses and nightgowns, shoes, cookbooks, candles, plenty of things she'd bought for the house, for the children. But she hadn't brought journals, books, or even photo albums with her when they first moved in. John hadn't brought all that much of his previous life either, so at the time it hadn't seemed strange. But now he didn't know what to think.

One Saturday he got a new babysitter to watch Dean while he went north to Omaha, where a postal worker claimed to have seen a harried woman with a baby, matching Mary's description, just a few days back. It turned out the man hadn't seen her face very clearly or even talked to her, just seen her rush in and out of the post office. John walked around town showing people Mary's photo, but no-one recognized her. He returned late on Sunday night, weary and disheartened.

He paid the babysitter absently, thinking only of crashing on the sofa to sleep. He'd already sunk into it with a deep sigh when he realized she still hadn't left.

“Anything I can do for you, miss...?” John couldn't even remember her name.

“Missouri Moseley,” she said, and the look in her eyes made John sit up, sensing trouble.

“Now I know it's not really my business. And I know it can't be easy, your wife walking out on you with your baby,” she said, gently, and then her voice became sharper: “But you can't carry on like you're doing right now.”

“Excuse me?” John asked, confused.

“I'm talking about your boy!” she hissed, crouching down in front of him. “He's four years old and already he's falling apart! He doesn't understand what happened, why his Mama left with his baby brother and obviously, _obviously_ he thinks it's his own fault! And now his Papa's also missing, gone every weekend and gone even at home, busy with work and with his mother's things and it just hurts me every time I look at him, I don't need to be psychic to know that he's in so much pain, and YOU. ARE. NOT. THERE. FOR. HIM!” her last words are a harsh whisper, her eyes furious above him.

“What?” John whispered back.

“Look, I don't know what happened with your wife, but if you don't step up and take care of Dean, talk to him, pay attention to him, hell, tell him that whatever happened, _it's not his fault_ , you're going to be losing one more son, and soon.” Her tone was sharp and deadly serious, John realized with a cold feeling in his gut.

Thinking back to the past few weeks, he saw it now, clearly: the dreadful silence that had been creeping slowly over their house. He hadn't been speaking much, just to remind Dean to wash his face and teeth, to tell him the babysitter had come, he'd be back later. And Dean, he realized with a mounting horror and guilt, hadn't been speaking much either. Or, lately, not at all. God, what had he done?

“Exactly. Now you see where your priorities are, I hope. Wherever she is, I'm pretty damn sure your wife is taking care of the baby. But Dean's in your hands from now on, and you need to get it in that thick head of yours if you want him to be fine. Got it?” said Missouri, looking at him very seriously.

John nodded, put his head in his hands, his shoulder slumping in defeat.

“Yeah,” he said finally, in a raspy, weak voice. “Got it. Yeah.”

Missouri nodded, satisfied that the message had gone through, and picked up her bag to leave. “Well,” she said, in a kinder tone of voice, “it's not that I don't adore Dean and would gladly babysit for him again, but I rather hope I won't be doing it anytime soon.”

John nodded again.

Missouri paused at the doorway, looking up. She seemed hesitant for the first time that evening. The change brought John's head up, expectant.

“The charms over the doors. Did your wife put them up?” she asked, softly.

John nodded, feeling unable to speak, numbly remembering Mary's frantic rush of activity that night.

“I know you don't believe in these things,” said Missouri. “But... there's a bad kind of energy in the nursery. I've never felt something like that before. It's like an echo of something very strong, and evil,” she whispered.

John shook his head and sighed. He remembered her name now, the rumors around town, about her supposed psychic abilities and her business. What a joke. But she'd been the only available babysitter for the whole weekend that he could get at a short moment's notice, and he hadn't cared much about the rumors.

“Okay. Well. Thanks, Missouri,” he said, getting up and seeing her to the door. “Thanks for... taking care of Dean. Good night,” he said, and closed the door on her.

**  
  
  
**

The next day he got up early to make a good breakfast for Dean. As usual lately, Dean was silent and unresponsive, but with some effort John managed to get him to eat and start talking a little bit again. In the afternoon, after work, John took his son out to the park. Instead of running straight to the swings like he used to, Dean walked by his side sedately.

John led the way to a pond with a few ducks swimming about, and sat down on the edge. Dean leaned forward silently to feed a few ducks some of his leftover cookies, while John watched him, trying to decide how to broach the subject.

“Dean, come here,” he told him, when Dean had got rid of all his cookies and was wiping crumbs off his pants. Dean walked up to him obediently, and John, after a second's hesitation, wrapped him up in his arms.

“I know things have been hard for us lately. For you and me both. I know you miss Mom and Sammy a lot. I do, too,” he started, voice low. Dean was silent and unmoving in his arms, but he felt a slight tremble at the end.

“I just need you to know, Dean – it's not your fault. Whatever reason Mom had for leaving, and taking Sammy – it was not your fault.”

Dean let out a strangled sob, only four years old and already trying his best not to cry.  John held him close, embracing him as firmly as he can, and after a few moments Dean started shaking in his arms, crying freely, snot running down his nose. John felt the pain deep inside his gut, and recalled for a moment the feeling he'd had when he first held Dean in his arms, such a small creature, fragile and incredibly perfect, the fear and awe in equal parts that had left him breathless for a whole minute, realizing for the first time what it meant to be a father, what it meant to have given life to this small child he had to take care of.

It still terrified him, but he held on, whispering senseless sounds of comfort, swaying gently, the way he'd done when Dean was a small baby to get him to sleep. Eventually Dean fell silent and still, body relaxed in John's arms.

“Dad?” he whispered, his voice more baby-like than it had been in a while.

“Yes?” John said, trying to make his voice calm and reassuring.

“Why did she go?” he asked, voice lost and hurt. And John felt the pain echoing inside him.

He kissed Dean's forehead, and told him, “I don't know, Dean. But I'm sure she's fine,” he lied, “I'm sure she's taking good care of Sammy.”

“When will she come back?” asked Dean.

John's throat felt tight, and he couldn't reply at once.

“I don't know,” he said. “But she'll be back, Dean. She and Sammy will be back someday,” he added, even though he wasn't sure if he was lying to Dean, if that would make it worse in the long run.

“And meanwhile, I'm here, and I'm gonna take care of you,” he said, more firmly.

Dean returned his hug, now, and after a while he got up, picked his son up and sat him down on his shoulders.

“What would you like to have for dinner?” John asked, hoping he wouldn't have to attempt cooking something too complicated. Luckily, Dean was happy with stopping at a shop to get some ready-made burgers.

**  
  
  
**

With a heavy heart, John left aside his search for a few years to concentrate on Dean. Mary and Sammy's absence still hurt, was still an almost physical ache, but a new routine emerged and took hold of their new lives. John got used to the new responsibilities at home, and hired a cleaning lady to help him around the house.

He played baseball with Dean in the afternoons, let Dean watch TV in the mornings before kindergarten while John made breakfast for both of them. On the days he couldn't get a babysitter, he took Dean to the shop with him, where he played under the receptionist's desk, pretending he was fixing cars. Dean was still more silent and subdued than he used to be, aside from the occasional tantrums in which he screamed for his mother and would settle for nothing less, as John looked on, defeated and completely lost.

When Dean turned six, John bought him a bicycle for his birthday and on the evenings he went out and taught him how to ride it, watching as he pedaled with more excitement and confidence every time, getting further and further away down the street.

And on Dean's eighth birthday, John took him out to watch a baseball game. It was full of people and Dean was all wide eyes and smiles, demanding John buy him every snack on offer. John held him up on his shoulders to watch and cheer the home-runs, let Dean scream himself hoarse and clap madly and hype himself on sugar. At one point in the game, the ball was hit so hard that it went up into the sky, and John blinked but he couldn't see it, until suddenly people around them were screaming and flinching away, and he looked up just in time to see the ball heading straight at them, and-

Smack! With a loud snap, the ball was held in the bony, reddened hand of a nun. She'd been sitting in front of them the whole game, not standing up, cheering, clapping or eating, and John had thought it was odd, but he'd shushed Dean when he commented loudly that nuns also liked baseball.

Now she was standing up, the ball still clutched in her hand, looking at it like she wasn't sure how it got there. Around them people were staring at her and some started cheering and clapping loudly.

“Wow, did you see that? She just stood up in the nick of time, and bam! Takes the ball in her hand, just like that. I've never seen anything like it!” a voice muttered from the crowd.

“That was really scary! For a moment I thought it'd fall right on top of that boy's head!” a woman's voice murmured, closer to them.

“Good catch, sister,” John told her, voice a little weak. He was suddenly clutching Dean a little too hard, and the boy wriggled from his grasp and approached the nun, an awed look on his face.

“Wow! How did you do that? Does it hurt?” he asked, in an excited voice.

The nun turned to look at Dean, with an intense, curious look that felt odd in her kind face. John took a step towards Dean, unconsciously.

The nun held out the ball to Dean, who had been eying it enviously.

“I wish you have an enjoyable birthday,” the nun said, and then left the stands, shuffling in her habit through the crowd.

“Well, that was strange,” John muttered, but Dean wasn't paying attention to him. He touched the ball reverently, inspecting every angle, and then looked up to smile at his father.

“Look, Dad! She gave me the ball! This is the best birthday ever!”

And the smile in Dean's face was so wide and utterly happy, a pure moment of joy, and John felt himself smiling back just as widely, letting his troubles slide away from him, just for a while.

**  
  
  
**

Dean didn't really like school. He didn't like sitting down and being quiet and reading the boring books the teachers wanted them to read. He didn't like the other children, the way they talked about him and his family behind his back. They didn't bother him much since the day a bigger boy had tried to take his lunch money and Dean pounced on him, hitting him without caring about getting hit. The boy had cried afterwards, and Dean had kept on playing by himself at recess.

He preferred going with his Dad to the park, or to the shop. But Dad was very busy, and often he was tired from work, and he just sat in front of the TV with a beer and stared off into space, not even watching the television, even though he insisted he wanted to watch the game when Dean asked him to play. When that happened, an unbearable, awful silence crept around the house, the sounds of the television barely keeping it at bay. Dean wanted to scream just to break the silence but Dad got upset whenever he did it. So he went out instead.

He told his Dad he was just going for a ride around the block, and Dad told him not to go too far, and Dean went out and took off like a bullet, speeding away, going past the park and through wide streets and neighborhoods like his, until he reached the edge of town, and then beyond it, through country lanes and farmland and meadows. He rode his bicycle as fast as he could, to see how far away he could go without his father noticing he'd been gone too long.

He ventured farther each time, exploring new paths and relishing the feeling of freedom, of being alone in unknown places, finding birds and raccoons and squirrels and cats. He sneaked into orchards to take fruit from the trees. He explored abandoned and possibly haunted farmhouses on the edges of town. He left his bike and walked through groves of oaks and maple trees, found a stream, and waded in barefoot, skipped pebbles in the water.  He tossed rocks at wasp nests and ran as hard as he could to get away from the swarms. And when he came back, a few hours later, sweaty and exhausted but happy, his father smiled at him – a small, strained kind of smile – and told him to take a bath before dinner, and asked him if he'd done his homework, and Dean always lied and said he had. Even that day when Dean came back covered in wasp stings, John just shook his head and told him to be careful, and gave him an ointment for the stings. Dean was fine with that, because if Dad knew he wouldn't let Dean go out, and he didn't know what he'd do, alone in his darkened room, the house too quiet around him.

One afternoon when he was ten years old, Dean went farther than usual exploring in a new direction, and came across an abandoned factory, a few brick-walled buildings and a big tower. Dean was excited and left his bike beside some bushes and crawled under a hole in the wire fence. He ran through the place, throwing rocks at the remaining windows, and pushed aside the rusty metal doors of the largest building to peek inside.

Dean made a gun with his hands and assumed his cowboy pose, like in the movies he watched with his Dad sometimes. He entered warily, on the lookout for ghosts or monsters or Indians. The inside was dark and smelled of mold. There were stacks of rotting wooden crates and a couple of large, rusting machines in the corner. Dean started shooting imaginary monsters that come up at him from the shadowy corners. He climbed the machines, almost slipping a couple of times, and ducked behind the crates to hide from his enemies.

He was running and shooting wildly, and he didn't see the well opening until one of his feet stumbled into thin air, and he lost his balance. It was a well large enough to fit a small child like him. His hands scrabbled against the edge but he couldn't hold on. The side of his head hit the tunnel wall as he fell, and he didn't have time to scream, there was no air in his lungs, and through the shock he could only think, _this is going to hurt_ -

But instead of crashing against water or hard rock, he fell into the embrace of a pair of arms, down there at the bottom of the well.

“Now... that was close. I was almost too late,” a voice said. He couldn't see the person's face, looking up, he could only see a small point of light from the opening, and it seemed very far away.

Suddenly Dean was blinking in the bright sunlight. They were somehow outside the building, the wide open blue sky above him. He looked up into an old man's pale, wrinkled face. The old man lowered him to the floor gingerly, like his joints hurt with every movement, and then he stared at Dean with his head slightly inclined to the side, examining him intently.

“You are hurt,” the man said with a raspy, grandpa kind of voice. Dean touched the side of his head and there was warm blood dripping from it. The scratches in his hands were stinging.

He started as the old man put his fingers, lightly, on his forehead. There was a warm rushing sensation spreading from his head to the tips of his toes, like warm water. He blinked again, and looked at his hands. The cuts were gone, like they were never there.

“Whoa!” he said, touching the part of his head that was bleeding moments before. “How did you do that? How did you get in the hole? How did you get us out? Bein' an old man and all. Sorry. Who are you?” Dean blurted out all his thoughts in a breath, unable to decide which questions he wanted to ask first, while staring curiously at the strange old man.

He smiled at Dean like smiling wasn't a thing he did often, and straightened up slowly.

“My name is Castiel. I am an angel of the Lord.”

Dean stared, eyes widened, before frowning.

“You don't look like an angel.”

The old man looked down at his body, as if assessing it for the first time.

“Well, the vessel is temporary and perhaps not very impressive, but he is a devout man, and the best I could get in a hurry.”

“Huh?”

“This is not my real form.”

“Oh... so how do you really look like? Can I see?” asked Dean.

“My original form can only be seen and heard by a few select, very special human beings. It is not advisable in general for humans to see us. It can have very unpleasant consequences.”

“So... you won't show me?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Are you my guardian angel?” blurted Dean, the question somehow feeling very important.

Castiel frowned, and replied hesitantly: “Well, it is my current duty to keep you from mortal peril, so I guess, in a sense, you could say so...”

“That means yes?”

“Yes?” it wasn't so much a statement as a question.

“Wow,” Dean muttered, a quiet expression of awe, more to himself than to the man in front of him.

The angel seemed to shake himself from his silent confusion and he bent forward slowly to look Dean in the eye.

“Dean... It is dangerous for children to go into these abandoned places. Had I not reached you in time, you would have fallen to your death, and the police would have taken a long time to find your body.”

Dean was silent for a moment, as the cold, creeping realization of his mortality came upon him, for the first time in his life.

“Why do you always play by yourself, so far from your house? Why don't you go play with your friends?”

Feeling suddenly uncomfortable, Dean shuffled his feet, and replied with a low mutter, “I don't have any friends.”

“But there are many children your own age in your city. Many at your school. Some of them live in your neighborhood,” Castiel said, like he couldn't understand such a simple fact of Dean's life.

“They hate me,” he said, morosely.

“No, they don't. The boy you are thinking of, in particular, has invited you a few times to play with him and his friends.”

Dean stared at the man, suddenly shaken. He thought back to the few times that Tommy Jones, who lived down the street and was a year above him in school, had talked to him at recess. At the time, he'd thought his invitation to come and play was mocking, and he'd ignored it as he headed to his usual corner.

“Oh,” Dean said, quiet.

“Very good. Now, go home and make friends and take care of yourself. I will hopefully see you much later.”

“Wait-” Dean started to say, without knowing very well what it was he wanted to ask or say to his guardian angel, but with a sound like birds taking off in flight, the old man had vanished.

He didn't tell his Dad anything about it, but that night he remembered his mother's words, her last words to him before she vanished with Sammy. “Angels are watching over you,” she used to say, and Dean felt some kind of comfort, a signal of love, in the fact that she had been telling him the truth.

A few days later, Dean found Tommy Jones looking at him at recess. Dean smiled at him, an unsure, wary sort of smile, and the other boy answered with a large, pleased grin, and motioned for Dean to come play with him and his friends.

**  
  
  
**

Years had passed since the night Mary left with Sam, and John was nowhere nearer to finding them than the first day. John was sure the police were not looking for them anymore. Some time after Dean started school, John hired a private detective to find them, but after months of searching, the detective had told John that if Mary was still in the country, she had hidden herself very well. John still spent some nights going through Mary's belongings again and again, reading through her cookbooks for every scratch and note she'd made in the margins. It haunted him to think how little he'd actually known about her when they got married. Now that she'd been missing for years, those large blanks in her history bothered him, and he started taking occasional trips to search for any records available on Mary's family. When the search proved too complicated for him to do on his free time, he contacted the private detective again to search through archives and county registers for any information on the Campbell family.

Detective Peterson gathered a few birth records and death certificates, putting together a sketchy family tree. It became clear that the Campbells had moved around the country a lot, changing their address every few years, sometimes disappearing from a town during the night, never to be seen again. After months of dead ends, Peterson invited John to a bar for a few drinks and told John that his resources had run out, and that perhaps John should invest his money on his son's future.

John stopped paying the detective but continued frequenting the bars. It was just a way to let off steam out of Dean's view, John told himself. He didn't drink that much, nor that often, just a few drinks after work and a chat with some of the regulars. That's how he met Bettie, a one-night stand that turned regular. Even after the final fall-out, almost a year afterwards, he never thought of it as anything other than a fling.

It wasn't really giving up. It was just that Bettie left him feeling all the more the gap that Mary had left in his life. And not long afterwards a very pretty blonde woman came into the shop with sugar in her fuel tank and it had been a difficult repair, and they ended up talking for a good deal of the afternoon while John worked, and days later, after she paid him and drove off, he'd found her phone number alongside the receipt. Just one date, just one night, a little bit of fun, John told himself. And months later he had a steady girlfriend, without being really sure how it had happened. She never moved in, since John preferred meeting at her place. Dean knew, of course he did, although they never talked about it.

And for a while life seemed good. Dean was more outgoing since he started hanging out with Tommy Jones and his gang. He laughed and joked with them like he didn't have a care in the world, and John told himself he didn't mind that Dean didn't really talk much to him, or that he was frequently getting in trouble. _Boys will be boys_ , John thought to himself, even while he was threatening Dean to stop his driving lessons until his grades got better. And some days John thought he could really leave the past behind, but then he walked past the old nursery, where Mary's boxed belongings mixed with the old crib and Sammy's untouched and dusty toys, and the pain came back as strongly as ever, and he wondered again what had happened, where they might be now, if they were alive at all.

He held on for much longer than he thought he would, but the inevitable happened during Dean's sophomore year of high school, a fight no worse than the other fights before it, Sandra throwing everything in John's face, his lack of commitment, emotional unavailability, and God-knows what else. And John just gave up trying to convince her to stay. She walked out of his life and John felt somehow relieved. Someone in his life deserved the chance to be happy, and it wouldn't be him.

He gave into the dark longing that had come into his life when Mary left, and drunk himself into a stupor almost every night.

At first, Dean just gave him a wide berth whenever he came home to find his father drunk on the sofa, or in the kitchen. But after a few weeks Dean started slamming doors and shooting him disgusted, moody glances which rankled John, and a week after that John got called to Dean's school, where he got himself suspended for fighting in the corridors. John dragged him home and screamed at him, threatened to ground him and never let him ride the Impala if he couldn't think about his future and get his act together. And suddenly Dean was screaming back at him, calling him a loser, a drunkard who clearly wasn't worth fighting for, and John slapped Dean, hard. Dean took the hit without moving, staring back at John, and he'd been sure for a moment that Dean was about to hit back.

Instead, Dean ran off and locked himself up in his room, put on a CD at full volume, one of those death  metal bands that John despised. For a long moment John trembled with rage, all his body thrumming with the need to go kick Dean's door down and give him a lesson he would never forget, and he was halfway down the hall when he caught a glimpse of the closed nursery door, so he went in there instead. He spent a few hours locked inside the dusty, abandoned nursery, drinking a whole bottle of whisky, his head ringing with the hellish screams of the lead singer.

The house after that night was cloaked in an unbearable, tense silence. John and Dean avoided each other as much as they could. He didn't know how it would have ended up if he hadn't gotten the call from Peterson.

They met at the same bar where they'd last seen each other, but John was in no mood for small talk.

“What's the matter? You told me you had something for me,” said John, already finishing his third drink.

Peterson was taken aback for a moment, but he carried on: “I didn't want to get your hopes up, but... Well, your case always bothered me. And last week I was up in Duluth and there was some news going around that struck me as strange. I bought the papers and...”

“What did you find?” said John. Suddenly he was eager and attentive, and he held out his hand imperiously.

“I think I may have found Robert Campbell,” Peterson said, handing John two different articles about the same event. An old man was found murdered after the neighbors alerted the police when they heard screams and sounds of a commotion taking place inside his house. There had been no sign of a break-in, and the murderer was still at large. The man had moved in only a year ago, and the second news article gave his name as Robert J.

“I remember you mentioned in his description that he was missing two fingers from his left hand. Here, this article says the victim was a Vietnam veteran, had missing fingers and scars,” pointed out Peterson.

It wasn't much to go on, but John still felt a tiny spark of hope alighting inside him. He left the rest of his drink untouched, and the next weekend he woke Dean up early in the morning and made him pack a small overnight bag.

“What's goin' on?” Dean asked, still sleepy enough to be more confused than angry.

“I'm taking you to Missouri's place for the weekend. It's already agreed. You're going to be helping her with her garden and if she's satisfied with your work, she might even pay you.”

“What? Why? Where are you going?” asked Dean, outrage seeping into his voice.  

“There's something I have to do,” said John, evasively, and would not say anymore on the subject.

Dean arrived at Missouri's house moody and grumpy, and she instantly handed him a pair of gloves and told him to start pulling weeds before the sun got too strong. John nodded to her, grateful, and drove off.

John passed himself off as a reporter as he asked around. The neighbors described the victim as serious and reserved, and said he was often away on some unknown business for days and weeks at a time. They all mentioned his missing fingers and many scars. John broke into the house at night. There were still bloody tracks on the living room floor. He found a few photos of the man he vaguely remembered from his wedding day, who had introduced himself to John and exchanged a few whispered words with Mary before he left. There was a girl who looked like a younger Mary staring out from an old family photo. In the kitchen there was an open cupboard full to the brim with salt boxes, which was odd. On his way out, John saw an old car still parked in the garage with Wisconsin license plates.

The next week, he'd traced the car register to a small town in northern Wisconsin. He left Dean with Missouri again, and visited the address given in the license records: an empty old house currently for sale. John asked the neighbors, many of which did not recognize Robert Campbell's photograph. The next door neighbor recognized him after a while, and described a moody man who traveled often and didn't socialize much. At the end of the road lived a very old Hispanic lady who smiled when John showed her the photo, and invited him into her house for a cup of coffee. She told John a long and convoluted story, half in Spanish, of a ghost that had been haunting her house, which she had been convinced was her late husband. She told John that she had been afraid that the spirit was going to kill her and take her to hell, and that the man in the photo had come rushing to her aid, placing salt around her sofa and asking where her husband had been buried. According to her, she never had problems with the ghost again after the man's visit.

John was inclined to dismiss the woman's story as a product of senile dementia, but the salt thing kept bothering him. He had a clear memory of Mary running around the house making salt lines at the doors and windows. He'd swept piles of it over the next few days.

He came back to Missouri's house to find the fence freshly painted and a tired but relaxed Dean. He lingered for a moment after Dean closed the car door, hesitating.

“Come back tomorrow afternoon,” Missouri whispered. “And then you can ask me.”

John nodded before wishing her goodnight and closing the door behind him. He had the feeling that answers were coming, but he wasn't sure he would like them at all.

**  
  
  
**

Dean was seventeen when he had the accident. Tommy was going to be out of town for a weekend and he’d left his brand new motorbike with Dean, who was as thrilled with it as he’d been with his first bicycle. He’d rode it before, when Tommy first got it, but this time he’d have it to himself for a whole weekend. Since Friday afternoon when he’d picked it up at Tommy’s place, Dean had been riding around town, getting used to the feel of it, thinking about all the places he could visit in two days. When he got home that night, later than usual, he found his father in the garage loading the Impala’s trunk, and his good mood was ruined.

“What is this?” Dean asked, as he parked the motorcycle beside the Impala.

“I’ll be gone for the weekend, but I’ll be back by Sunday night. There’s food on the fridge-” said John.

“- and money on the counter, yeah,” said Dean in a tight voice.

John shot him a warning look and only then noticed the motorcycle. He closed the lid of the trunk with a snap.

“Whose is that?” he asked.

“It’s Tommy’s. He’s going to spend the weekend with his grandparents in Missouri. He’s asked me to look after it,” Dean replied, casually.

“You are not riding that, Dean. It stays in the garage for the whole weekend, do you understand me?” John said in a strict tone.

“Dad!” Dean said, dismayed.

“You don’t even have a license, Dean,” John reminded him.

“And whose fault is that? You haven’t even-”

“Dean! We’ve talked about this. Until you start actually passing your classes, you’re not driving or getting a license. Period,” John’s voice brooked no argument, but Dean was furious at that point.

“You’re always going on about me failing and skipping school, but what about you? You’re gone almost every weekend! Don’t you have a business to run? Seriously, do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing?” Dean said, practically shouting at the end.

John’s face went dark with fury. “Boy, watch your mouth. You have no idea-”

Dean interrupted him, screaming: “They’re gone, Dad! They’re gone and they’re not coming back! Don’t you think that if she had wanted to come back, she’d be back by now? Why _the fuck_ do you insist on looking for them? Why can’t you just-”

John seemed ready to slap Dean, again. But this time Dean wouldn’t back down. He was raring to go, fists clenched and jaw tight. Instead, John turned his back and got in the car, slamming the driver’s side door. As the Impala’s engine roared to life and the car backed out of the garage, Dean, in a moment of fury and frustration, aimed a kick at it, and missed.

“Go then! Do whatever you want! I’m gonna ride that bike all weekend and you won’t be able to stop me because YOU WON’T BE HERE!” Dean screamed at the retreating car, his father’s figure stiff in the driver’s seat.

Dean didn’t even wait for the next day. He got on the bike and sped off down the street. For a few moments he considered the possibility of following his father, picking a fight with him on the road, but the rage he was feeling was too strong, too out of control, and it was scaring him. He made a swift, rubber-burning U-turn and sped off out of town in the other direction.

The high speed and the curving roads in the darkness heightened his senses, and after a few minutes it felt less like he needed to draw blood, anyone’s, to be satisfied. He hadn’t even put on the helmet, and the cold wind was whipping against his face, and he blinked trying to see the road. For a split second, he thought he saw an apparition - a pale girl by the side of the road, illuminated by the headlights, but then it was gone, and Dean leaned to the side for a curve a bit too late, he was going a bit too fast, and he tried to brake but that turned out to be a mistake. He lost control of the motorcycle and went off the road, falling into a ditch head-first, body rolling down a hill. He heard the bike crashing further off. In the deafening silence that followed, he registered dimly the stabbing pain in his shoulders and right arm, he couldn’t feel his legs at all, and when he tried to move his head his vision swam violently, and he thought, desperately, _I’m going to die here, no-one will find me before it’s too late_ -

And before he lost consciousness he saw the apparition again, looking down at him from the side of the road.

When he woke up in hospital the next night, the apparition was standing by his bedside, looking at him with a small frown on her face. It was a plain girl, perhaps a bit younger than him, dressed in mennonite garb, examining him with an expression that seemed familiar.

“Who are you?” Dean opened his mouth to ask, but only a hoarse groan came out. He couldn’t move an inch of any part of his body. He must have been given pain medication, but he still felt awful.

“I thought it adequate to leave some of your injuries untouched. Perhaps they will be a lesson, for next time,” the girl said, in a very formal voice.

Her unblinking blue eyes brought the sudden memory of an abandoned factory, a deep well, and an old man from his childhood. Dean blinked, and tried to mouth the word, “Angel?”

The girl merely inclined her head to the side, still frowning a bit, and asked in a curious tone, “Why do you want to die, Dean?”

Dean took a sharp breath that got stuck in his lungs. He didn’t even attempt a reply. Dazed and hurt, he closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep.

When he woke up next morning, he could hear his father’s voice. Dean pretended to still be asleep while he listened to his father talking to the doctors.

“We still don’t know who brought him in. He was left like that in one of the beds in the ER. None of the night staff saw anything,” one of the doctors was saying.

“But he’s going to be okay?” asked John.

The doctor’s tone indicated it was not the first time John had asked that question. “Yes. He can be discharged in a few days if his recovery continues at this rate. With PT for a few months, he’ll recover the full use of his arms and shoulders.”

As the doctors stepped away, Dean heard John’s heavy footfalls approaching and heard as he slumped down on the chair by his bedside. John laid his head on Dean’s bed, just shy of touching his son. He stayed there for a long time, and Dean was getting sleepy again when he heard his father’s quiet sobs. His head was shaking against the bed, as he cried and gasped into the bedsheets. He was muttering something, and Dean had to strain to hear it-

“S’ry… so sorry… Dean… I’m just… I _can’t not_ … I need to… Don’t you want them back, too? Why don’t you...”

Something clenched in Dean’s chest as he felt his eyes welling with tears. He bit back his own sobs, but John’s head had already snapped up from the bed. Dean opened his eyes to look at his father’s tear-streaked face. John embraced him, carefully, and held him for a long time.

**  
  
  
**

After Dean got discharged from hospital, he and John reached an agreement. Tommy’s motorcycle had been badly damaged and Dean promised his friend he would pay for the repairs, however long it took. There were also hospital bills and PT bills to pay, so John had to take more work at the shop and stop his weekend trips. Dean asked his father if he could drop out of school to work at the shop, and John told him he could work there a few hours a week, promised he’d teach him the trade, as long as Dean graduated high school, even if he had to take one more year to do it. Things seemed fragile and unsteady with them at the moment, and Dean hadn’t wanted to argue anymore, so he agreed. And after Cindy Rogers, a very pretty dark-haired girl, volunteered to tutor Dean in maths and science, he didn’t feel like complaining so much.

Dean knew that even if John was playing the role of a good father, sooner or later he’d be back to searching for his missing wife and child. And there was nothing Dean could do about it. _At least he’s not drinking anymore_ , Dean said to himself.

 


	3. Chapter 2

 

Mary ran as fast and smart as she could. She hotwired a car near the bus station, and drove east. She changed cars, took a bus, hotwired another car. For two days and nights she ran aimlessly, too scared to stay more than a few hours in a single place. On the third night she rented a motel room to cut off and dye her hair and sleep for a few hours. Sam had been crying practically nonstop since he woke up on the morning of their first day on the run, only quieting to eat or sleep, far less frequently than Mary would like. Mary rocked him as she took stock of her situation.

She needed a car, weapons, fake documents, and above all, she needed to do a lot of research. She didn't know anything about the yellow-eyed demon, what it was, what it wanted, how to kill it. With limited funds and no documents at all, it was going to be extremely difficult to get her hunt started.

She knew what her next step must be, as much as she didn't like it. The next day, she drove to a phone booth and called a number she hadn't dialed since her parents' deaths. Her uncle answered on the second ring, and Mary hated the imploring sound of her voice as she said:

“Uncle. Something happened. I need your help.”

Her uncle Robert just gave her an address in Michigan and hung up abruptly. By the time Mary got there, after eleven hours of driving, stopping often to rest for a little while, with Sammy crying all the time, she was almost glad at the idea of seeing her uncle again.

Even so, she felt like turning around and leaving when she saw who was waiting for her. Back when she had been hunting with her parents, she had avoided her cousin Richie as much as she could. Uncle Robert and his children were good hunters, but her cousin Richie had always given her the creeps. He saw her before she could give in to her impulse and walk away. His handsome features twisted into a wide, leering smile, and he came up to greet her and tap the baby on the head.

“So you finally left that loser. What took you so long?” he said, winking at her.

“Where's my uncle?” Mary asked.

“We've a place in Lansing. I'll take you there, and you can tell us what's up. Come along now,” said Richie as he walked toward a truck parked nearby. Mary hesitated for a second before following him.

Robert Campbell had a small house with a large garage where two cars were already parked. When they arrived he was waiting for them in the porch. He still looked tall and imposing, although his face was more scarred and his remaining hair was completely gray. He briefly raised his three-fingered hand in a curt greeting, although there was warmth in his eyes. Her younger cousin Sarah brought out some drinks to the coffee table, and she and Richie stood in the doorway of the living room, staring at their guests.

“So what exactly is going on?” Robert asked. Mary glanced nervously at her cousins. She had no intention of making a full disclosure of the truth – she had no idea how they would react if they suspected something had been done to Sam, and he was now something other than human. Rich was smiling at her like he was prepared to enjoy whatever came out of her mouth.

Robert looked at his son and daughter. “Leave us,” he barked out.

Sarah raised an eyebrow, but Richie crossed his arms and argued, “Why? If she's come to us for help, she should tell all of us what's the problem.”

Robert merely looked at him until Sarah took Richie's arm and dragged him down the corridor. A few moments later, they heard a door slam, and Mary relaxed a fraction.

Picking her words carefully, she told her uncle an edited story, making it seem like a strange and powerful yellow-eyed creature had come into her house and promised to come back for her baby in the future. How it had come in, and why it had chosen her, she left as unknown. Uncle Robert looked at her gravely.

“What do you need?” he asked, after a moment.

“I need to know what this thing is and how to kill it,” she said.

“The family records are in a safe house, not too far from here. I'll take you there when you're ready. I can lend you one of our cars, and we have plenty of weapons you can use. I can get you some IDs, and if there's anything you need for the little one, all you have to do is ask,” said Robert.

Mary was speechless for a moment. “I... Thank you. It's really a lot to ask for-” she started to say.

“Listen, Mary. Samuel and I didn't always see eye to eye. We spoke some harsh words to each other, and I regret that he died without... We're family. No matter what, we take care of each other. You did right coming here for help. The only thing I'll ask of you,” he said, leaning in towards Mary, “is that you have me at your side when you go after that bastard. Got it?”

Mary nodded, smiling gratefully. She had never known why, but her uncle Robert had always favored her. It had only made her uncomfortable before, but now she felt glad of it, for just a moment.

Robert stood up briskly and offered her a hand up. “Come. You and the baby need food and rest,” he said.

  
  
Mary spent the next few months living in a small cabin in northern Michigan, with a trapdoor hidden beneath a threadbare carpet that led to an iron-walled panic room, which contained many of the collected books and journals of previous generations of Campbell hunters. Mary set to work immediately, checking every book and journal, searching for any information on demons, yellow-eyed creatures, and demon deals.

When she wasn't bent over some book, Mary trained following her mother's strict exercise routine. Her years as a housewife had softened her, but she had to regain her hunter's physical condition if she was going to kill that demon. Throughout it all, she kept an eye on Sammy constantly. She needed to find out exactly what the demon wanted with him, what – if anything – had been done to her baby. The first days, she had performed some basic tests, like dripping holy water over Sammy's forehead, or slipping a little bit of salt in his mouth. He'd fussed at the feel of the cool water and winced at the flavor of salt, all perfectly normal baby reactions. Sammy was still a curious, active, fussy baby. He crawled around the cabin, touching everything he could get his hands on: matchboxes, bullets, candles. The only change in him was a renewed tendency to wake up at night, screaming and crying in fear. Mary comforted him as best as she could, feeling guilty and at the same time grateful for his presence.

If it hadn't been for Sam, she would never have made it through those first months. The routine of feeding him, bathing him, changing his nappies and playing with him was the only thing left over from her old life. Taking care of his simple needs became the most important and enjoyable part of her daily routine. She would take breaks from translating long paragraphs in Latin or doing push ups in the cold cabin floor, and she'd take him in her arms, kiss his chubby cheeks, play with him and his new stuffed rabbit.

Her family's resources were excellent regarding demon lore, devil's traps and protective symbols, but after four months, she hadn't found a single mention of a yellow-eyed demon. However, she did find an important lead to follow: several references to a weapon that could apparently kill even the most powerful creatures – a gun made by Samuel Colt himself. Of course, she wasn't sure that it wasn't a mere legend, or if it did exist, what had happened to it.

As a parting gift, her uncle Robert gave her fake IDs and other documents for her and Sammy, a silver holy water flask, and his old station wagon, and reminded her of her promise to call whenever she needed help with the hunt. Mary agreed readily, and spent the next year moving frequently, staying in motels and cheap sublets, resorting to the tricks her parents had taught her for survival in difficult times: fraud, shoplifting, pickpocketing. She traveled across the country to access a library's special collection on demon lore, or to check out personally any rumors of demonic activity and yellow-eyed creatures.

It was uncle Robert, whom she called occasionally, that suggested she go to Daniel Elkins: “He's got one of the best lore collections in America, unique books you won't find in any library. Your cousin George met him a couple years ago. I think he might be willing to help.”

Frustrated with the little progress she'd made so far, Mary agreed, and a month later she was staying in Daniel Elkins' guest room in a cabin in Colorado. He gave Mary access to his enviable collection of ancient lore books, some of them written in languages Mary barely recognized, and occasionally offered to help with some difficult passages. After a few weeks she grew tired of take-out and canned food and asked permission to use the kitchen to prepare a good homemade meal for her and her host. She did this with a pang of guilt, like she was somehow being unfaithful to John. Cooking had been her housewife hobby, and one she'd cultivated with a passion.

After a while of keeping to themselves, they grew accustomed to each other's presence, and they started sharing beer and conversation in the evening, talking about their hunts, ghosts, vampires and demons. Mary discovered that Elkins was a history buff: he was an expert on hunter history, and knew things about her ancestors that her family ignored.

One of those evenings, Elkins smiled at her and said: “You sure know your stuff, Mary. Why don't you come with me on my next hunt? Take down some vampires. It'll be fun.”

Mary smiled back politely and told him she couldn't. “I can't leave Sammy alone. He's not yet three years old. And I can't risk getting hurt on a hunt, right now.”

Elkins nodded. “Of course,” he said, and changed the subject. But there was a strange glint to his eye that made Mary uncomfortable.

A week later, as Elkins was sitting beside her and explaining a particularly obscure passage, Mary felt his fingers brush her knees. It could have been accidental, but when Mary glanced at him, the look in his eyes was unmistakable. She did her best to keep her distance, ask him questions to keep him occupied with the explanations, but at last he fell silent, and took her hand, caressing her wrist softly. When he leaned in to kiss her, Mary averted her face and stood up quickly.

“It's late. I should be going to sleep now,” she said.

“Come on. It's early still. We can have some fun,” Elkins said, and he grabbed her arms and kissed her, forcefully.

Her body reacted before she was even aware, her elbow slamming into his face, and for a second his body tensed like he was about to strike back. Then he took a step back, nose bleeding and fists clenched at his side. Mary waited with her hands raised in a fighting position.

“That hurts, _bitch_ ,” he spat at her, and then turned and walked out of the cabin, slamming the door hard. The noise was enough to wake Sam up, and she hurried to the guest room.

He was surely on his way to a bar now, and wouldn't be back until the next day, drunk and either angry or miserable. She had no desire to confront either, so she packed her things in a hurry. There were still plenty of books waiting for her perusal, but she left them stacked neatly in the guest bedroom. Half an hour later, she and Sammy were gone.

 

Mary avoided unnecessary contact with other hunters for a long while after that. She kept calling her uncle for any news and traveling to investigate a case or two. Most of the cases she found were a bust: hoaxes for insurance fraud, rumors of a miraculous healing spread by desperate church parishioners, urban legends. Occasionally her search for rumors of yellow-eyed creatures led her to an actual hunt. She still felt a low-level panic every time Sammy was out of her sight, so on those occasions she called her uncle for help. He came willingly, although sometimes he sent Sarah and Richie in his place.

Sammy grew up seemingly from one day to the next. The first time he said “mommy”, Mary smiled with joy, and didn’t allow herself to wonder what John would have said, or to remember Dean’s own first words - she was always very aware of the treacherous path she had chosen, and forced herself to stay focused in the present, on Sammy and the hunt.

Of course, once he started talking, Sammy started asking questions about anything and everything. One day, Sammy asked: “Is unc' Rob my Dad, Mom?” She laughed and shook her head, and replied: “No, Sammy. He's not your Dad. He's my uncle – he's my father's brother. Your great-uncle.”

She knew what the next question would be.

“Where's my Dad?” Sammy asked.

Mary answered carefully. “It's just you and me now, Sammy.”

“Okay,” Sammy said, and went back to watching cartoons and asking about dinosaurs.

The question came up several times throughout the years, and Mary stuck to the same answer.

“Why don't I have a Dad?” asked Sammy one day when he was five. “Are you divorced?”

“Something bad happened,” said Mary, and hugged her son tightly. “It's just you and me, Sammy. I love you and I promise you'll be safe with me. I'll never let anything bad happen to you.” Sam hugged her back but he still had that small frown and stubborn pout that reminded Mary of John, sometimes.

“Come on. Let’s read your animals book and then we can prepare something nice for dinner. How about it?” she offered, with a big smile on her face. Sammy finally relented and brought out his new favorite book, an encyclopedia of animals for children, reading the words he recognized along with Mary.

 

One night in a shabby apartment they had recently moved into, Mary woke up as Sammy hurriedly climbed into her bed.

“What's the matter, Sammy?” Mary asked, immediately alert and scanning the room for threats. There seemed to be nothing there, just the streetlight projecting moving shadows of trees and passing cars on the wall and ceiling. Sammy huddled beside her body and mumbled something.

“What is it? Tell me,” she said, gently carding her fingers through his hair.

“There's something in the closet,” he said, more clearly this time. Mary didn’t stop her soothing caress, but she sat up straighter and softly took the gun from under her pillow.

Children are afraid of the dark, of monsters in the closet or under the bed. It's a phase, brought on by very active imaginations and not enough experience of the world. Then again, Mary knew what kind of creatures only walk in shadows and hunt at night. Perhaps children's fears are wiser than those of adults.

“I'll go check it out, okay?” she said, and went towards the closet at the other end of the room, where she'd set out a mattress for Sam to sleep and play in. Gun in one hand and flashlight in another, she opened it carefully and checked out every corner and nook. She patted the inside walls of the closet, decaying wood that crumbled at her touch, and examined the outside as well. She passed her EMF meter over it, and just to be sure, she made a salt line around it, and closed the latch firmly.

“No monsters in the closet, Sammy,” she told him, kissing his brow.

“You sure?” he asked, voice still shaky.

“Very sure,” she said.

“But...” he started to say, gripping her nightgown.

“Hey, don't worry about it. You can sleep here tonight, I'll keep watch. Any monsters come out of that closet, Mommy will shoot them down. Got it?”

Sammy looked for a moment at the gun on Mary's hand, contemplating how much damage it could do to a monster. Finally, he nodded and settled back on the bed by her side.

“Goodnight, sweetie. Sleep well,” she told him.

He was sound asleep in minutes, comforted by his mother's scent in the blankets. It took Mary a longer time to fall asleep again. A stray thought escaped her usually tight rein, and she wondered why she had never told Sammy that angels were watching over him, like she used to tell Dean.

She knew better now, is all.

  
  


At first, Mary had no intention of sending Sammy to school. The thought of leaving him on his own for hours at a time, surrounded by complete strangers, terrified her. Instead, she signed up for a home-school program and got the books and materials before skipping town yet again.

Sam was a fast and avid learner. He could read since he was five, and spent long hours while Mary did her research reading children's storybooks from the local library. Aside from maths and geography, Mary taught Sam the basics of gun safety and self-defense techniques. But the more Sam learned, the more questions he had. Soon enough he noticed that the way they lived was not exactly normal: moving every few months, using a different name in every city, taking things without paying in libraries or stores. Sam was seven years old when he privately concluded that his mother was a spy, with a secret job fighting bad guys. When he asked his mother about it, she assured him again that Sam would be safe with her, and reminded him to be careful with strangers, deflecting the question like she always did.

But Sam was as stubborn as he was curious. He was eight years old when Mary began to trust him to stay at home on his own for a few hours. One day they were in Lafayette, Indiana, where Mary was investigating the case of a mother dying in a nursery fire in 1983, which the baby had survived. The family had been on the news a few years before that, when the eldest daughter had made a reportedly miraculous recovery after being run over by a car.

Before leaving, Mary double-checked the salt lines and the devil’s trap under the motel room doormat, instructed Sam not to open the door to anyone under any circumstance, and to finish his maths exercises before she got back, and reminded him he’d be in trouble if she found out he’d been watching TV instead. Mary locked the door behind her and went to the county hospital, where she conned her way into the offices to check the records. She confirmed the medically unexplained recovery of the daughter. Afterwards, at the police station, she found that the fire had been classified as a gas explosion, although no evidence was ever recovered to support this. She also managed to find the current address of the child's family. They had moved house but were still in town.

With the current investigation done for the day, she called the motel room from a public phone to ask if Sam wanted pizza for dinner. His answer, without a trace of the excitement she was expecting, alarmed her, and she headed straight back to the motel.

She found Sam sitting down in the bed, crying quietly. She dropped her bag and ran toward him, asking, “What's wrong, Sammy? Talk to me,” but then she saw it: the motel safe was open, and strewn over the bed were all her notebooks, collected newspaper articles, hunter's history and lore books and right there beside Sam, the copy she had made of her great-grandfather's journal, opened to a page depicting a horrifying wendigo. Thankfully, her own research was written in code, all her information on the yellow-eyed demon and demon deals unreadable to Sam.

“Samuel,” she said, in her gravest tone, “I put all these things in the safe for a reason. I've told you many times not to touch them. Why did you do it?”

Sam kept crying, and between sobs he said, “I- I just wanted to know. I wanted to – to know the truth. But- but... this isn't true, right? Monsters don't really exist?”

Mary sighed and sank to the bed beside her crying son. She put an arm around him and brought him close to her. She knew this day would come, sooner or later. She'd just really hoped it would be later.

She started talking very calmly. After a while, Sam stopped sobbing, and just listened.

“My father never made a secret of it. He said it was best to be always prepared. He taught me about ways to protect myself since I could walk and talk. I grew up learning about all kinds of monsters, what they do, how to protect against them, how to kill them. It wasn’t a normal way to grow up, and it was hard, but… now I understand. My parents wanted me to be safe. They believed that knowing about all these monsters out there would help me be safe. Yes, Sammy, most people don't know, they don't want to know, but there are bad, dangerous things out there. People in my family have known for generations, and for generations they have hunted them to keep other people safe. That’s what Uncle Robert does, and Sarah too. I didn't want to tell you until you were older, but now that you know, I'll teach you so you can protect yourself.”

“But Mommy – will the monsters come after us? Is that why we're always moving? And, and... if you go after them, will they hurt you?” Sam asked, tears welling up in his eyes again.

Mary tried her best to comfort him. “Sammy, Sammy – look at me. Nothing’s going to happen, you hear me? I'm good at this, and I'm always very careful. Whenever I have to do something risky, I call Uncle Robert or Sarah and they come help me out. I'm always going to be here to protect you, okay? And if you learn your lessons and follow my instructions, you'll know how to protect yourself. Do you understand?”

Sam nodded, still sobbing a bit. Mary held him until he calmed down.

“Tomorrow we'll start with your lessons. For now, let's get pizza and after we'll play whatever you want, okay?” she offered.

  
  
They stayed six weeks in Lafayette, as Mary continued investigating the nursery fire and the boy who’d lost his mother, Scott Carey. She would go out for a few hours in the morning or in the afternoon, and when she came back, she checked Sam’s English homework and his salt lines, and continued his lessons, which now included methods of protection against vengeful spirits and herbs used to make protective amulets.

Ever since he learned about the monsters, Sam had wondered if they were responsible for the bad thing that happened with his father. But he knew his mother didn’t like talking about that, and the one time he tried to bring it up, a few weeks after Mary started teaching him about the monsters, she told him sharply-

“We’re not talking about this today. Now tell me, what do you use to protect yourself from an angry spirit?”

Sam wanted to insist, but Mary shot him a stern look, and he gave in.

Some time after, Mary decided she had gone as far as she could in her investigation of Scott Carey and his mother’s death. The circumstances of her death were suspicious, but she didn’t find any definitive proof that it was the yellow-eyed demon’s doing, apart from vaguely strange occurrences that were reported a few weeks before the fire.

For his part, the boy Scott, which was Sam’s age, had no history of strange things happening around him, apart from the night his mother died. He was a small boy, quiet and introverted. He didn’t seem to get on well with his older sister, and didn’t play with other children. He had a hard-working father and a stepmother who cared for him, although she seemed at a loss as to how to connect with her new husband’s children. Scott was no doubt a troubled child, but he didn’t seem to be anything other than human. Mary vowed to keep an eye on that family, just in case, but moved on to another city.

Mary had a new plan for Sam. She rented a small apartment and sat Sam down and asked him if he’d like to go to school. His eyes lit up at the suggestion, but he asked, “Will it be safe? What about the monsters?”

She smiled at him, reassuringly. “Well, I've been thinking about this for a while now. It's getting harder for me to teach you school things, and you need to be with kids your own age. You're learning really fast about all the monsters, and you're doing good in self-defense as well. We'll have to be careful, of course: we will need to use different names outside the house and not tell anyone the truth. If you keep your eyes open, you'll be perfectly fine,” She said that as much for herself as for Sam, but it seemed to do the trick; Sam hardly needed more convincing.

When Sam started school, Mary found a job at the local hospital, working as an assistant nurse. This half-settling down would hinder her chances of moving quickly and continuing the hunt, but she figured she'd manage somehow, making short trips out of the city when necessary. Right now, she needed to see Sam happy, confident and laughing again. That was worth a couple years on the hunt.

And then three years later, they were living the same kind of life in another state when Mary got a call from Sarah. She was on a pay phone, Mary could hear the sounds of traffic, and at first she couldn’t hear what her cousin was saying. And then Sarah repeated it, more clearly:

“Dad's dead. We don't know how they found him but... it was a demon. There was sulfur and… They slit his throat and left him there on the bed. Mary, I- I know this is the job. This is the risk we take. And I know you've got something very serious going on, and you're doing the best you can for your kid. I understand it all now. I – I'm pregnant, you know? So me and Richie are going to be laying low for a while. We might go to Canada, or who knows, maybe Costa Rica. George wants to help, but now he's also worried about his own family. I'm sorry. I know you still need our help, but this time, we gotta take off.”

Mary said, “Of course, it's okay, I understand,” a few times, still feeling numb, mind reeling from the news. Had she exposed her uncle to this attack? Had this been her fault? Sarah continued, in a hurry to finish the conversation.

“Listen, I'm gonna give you a few numbers. I know you don't like to work with other hunters much, but these guys are good, you can trust them. I hope they can help you.”

She rattled off a few names and numbers, and hardly allowing Mary to say a final, “Thank you. Good luck,” she hung up.

It was the last time she heard from her cousins.

  
  


Mary remembered her first hunt, clear as day. She was fourteen and already an excellent shot and a good fighter, but she was terrified. Her mom and dad had taken her as backup on what seemed like a simple salt-and-burn case, but it turned out they had the wrong grave. The spirit, aware of what they were trying to do and completely enraged, flung Deanna against a gravestone. Her father had moved quickly, firing off a shot before running to his wife's side, but Mary had been paralyzed with fear when the spirit had appeared suddenly in front of her, even though she could hear her father screaming at her to fire, to run, to _move_... it was only all those years of training under the ruthless direction of her father that saved her, muscle memory making her duck and saving her from being impaled by a large branch flying in her direction. She had dropped her gun in the hassle, and she scrambled to get it back, but the spirit was now assailing her with sharp rocks, and it was all she could do to duck behind a gravestone.

They had been lucky. The grave they needed was just a few feet away from the first, but they still struggled trying to build a salt circle around it, with Deanna badly hurt and barely able to walk. Her father had to shovel as fast as he could, while Mary guarded her parents from the spirit, who kept throwing rocks and heavy branches in her direction. By the fifth shot, and the third rock that had barely missed her, Mary was fully focused on her task, all fear forgotten.

It had come back afterwards, when they were back at a motel room, taking care of their wounds. Her dad had taken a celebratory shot of whisky, and given some to her. Suddenly the realization struck her – they'd disposed of a dangerous spirit who could have easily killed her and her family, who had been haunting and murdering people in that town for years – and it was crazy and very much terrifying. She had vowed to raise her children differently, and now she was feeling the bitter taste of that desire in her mouth, every day.

Sam was thirteen on his first hunt, although it hadn’t been Mary’s intention for it to happen. She had started taking hunts outside her search for the yellow-eyed demon because she owed Bill Harvelle a damn big favor.

After her uncle’s death and her cousins’ escape, she had been left without a contact in hunter circles and back-up for dangerous missions. Reluctantly, she had called some of the hunters her cousin had recommended, and she found Bill Harvelle to be the best and most trustworthy. When she went to him with a plan for trapping a demon in California, he’d agreed readily. And in the middle of it, a stupid mistake on her part had almost cost Bill his life - would have, if Mary hadn’t been armed with an extra flask of holy water and a quick exorcism. Bill survived but his legs didn’t, and when Mary brought him back to the Roadhouse, Ellen Harvelle had shoved a shotgun in her face and threatened to shoot her if she ever came back. Mary had taken Sam and left in a hurry, half afraid Ellen would change her mind about not pulling the trigger.

Bill had called later that day, warm and cheerful as usual, apologizing for his wife and whole-heartedly thanking Mary for saving his life and bringing him back home. He kept in contact after that, informing Mary about possible demon hunts, and occasionally, when there was a nearby hunt that no-one else could take, he’d sorrowfully bring up the injury that prevented him from taking it himself, and Mary would offer to take it.

That October, she took a few days off from her job and brought Sam with her to Rochester, New York. When Mary came back to the motel room after interviewing witnesses in the morning, Sam left aside his homework and asked about the case, curious as always. When Mary left for the library after a quick lunch, Sam insisted on going with her. He joined her in the microfiche section and helped her out, and after a few hours, it was he who found what they were looking for.

“Look, Mom. Michael Russo, mafia boss, killed by gunmen in the street in 1952. There’s a photo. Is that him? The man seen killing those people?”

The man in the photo fit the description perfectly, down to the scar on his left eyebrow, a mobster back from the dead to take revenge on the descendants of the people who'd betrayed him. After a bit more digging, Mary found the exact location of the family crypt where he had been buried.

She quickly drove Sam back to the motel room. There was a family of four next on the hit list, warned by a bloody handprint on their door. For some reason, though, Sam was worried and reluctant to let her go.

“Don't worry, Sammy, it's going to be alright. Stay in the room and do your homework,” she said, in a hurry to leave.

When she arrived in the cemetery, she was surprised to find the crypt open and the corpse gone. The casket was left open and empty. She realized it too late: why would the spirit return so many years later; just now? And suddenly the crypt door closed behind her, sharply, leaving her in pitch darkness. She tried to move it, pushing with all her might, but it wouldn't budge. It seemed to be bolted from the outside. When she turned on her flashlight, the light flickered and she found herself face to face with the ghost, looking at her with eyes full of hate. She reacted quickly, shooting him and backing away to a corner, where she spread salt around her in a protective circle. The flashlight was already dying, and the ghost kept coming at her, and she was trapped, unable to help that family, to help herself…

For a moment she despaired, thinking desperately, _I can't die here, I can’t die here, oh God Sammy_ -

She closed her eyes and sank down to her knees, trying to stave off the panic. When she opened her eyes again, the crypt was silent. The ghost seemed to have vanished. And then she heard an insistent whisper coming from outside: “Mom? Mom? MOM!”

“Sam?” she whispered back.

“Mom! I figured it out! It was in the paper. All the dead families - they all had the same lawyer. He's got blood ties to Russo! I saw him leaving the cemetery just a minute ago!”

“Sam! Just get me out of here! And be careful!” she whispered back, feeling more terrified now than when the ghost had been attacking her.

 _Get yourself under control, Mary_ , she reminded herself, with a voice not unlike her father's.

She heard the rough scrape of steel against stone, and then she pushed the door and slowly, it gave way. Sam was outside, red-faced and panting. He started talking before Mary was out of the crypt:

“Mom! He had a spellbook, this small leather thing, and I think he's going after the Martinos right now! He's using the spirit to kill those people!”

“Yes. I met him him this morning. I know where he must be keeping the body,” she muttered, thinking fast as she ran out of the cemetery, Sam following by her side. There was no time now. If she went for the body, who would protect the family? She took a deep breath as she took the driver’s seat, and handed the sawed-off to Sam.

She gave him the instructions as she drove: “Sam. I need you to go to the Martinos, get them out of the house, say there's a fire or something. If you need to, remember, aim then shoot, and pour a salt circle around you for protection. Got your salt pouch? Good. Go, now!”

Mary dropped him off at the corner of the Martinos' street, while she sped off towards the office where she had talked to the lawyer that morning. She hurried, aware that every second she delayed was one more second where Sam was in danger. After a frantic search, she found what she was looking for hidden behind the bookcase: a small closet-like room, only illuminated by the candles on an altar, the decaying body lying in a chair in the middle of the room. Luckily there were no water sprinklers in that little room, and at that moment she felt no compunction about burning down an office building. She destroyed the altar with a kick before spraying gasoline on the body and lighting it. It caught fire quickly, the corpse dried and old, the wooden altar burning with it. She didn't wait for it to burn to ashes before she left the building.

When she came back to the Martinos’ house, Sam was standing guard next to the family. The father was cradling the sobbing children to his chest while the mother repeated, “What just happened?” again and again, in a shocked tone. Sam was pale and had a nasty scratch on his forehead, but otherwise he looked fine. As soon as he saw Mary, he ran into her arms and started speaking, almost too fast to understand, “Mom! You did it! The ghost just went up in flames and disappeared! I managed to get them out of the house when it attacked. It was going to kill them! I shot it and it came after me, and I ran, and then the lawyer was screaming at it to go after the family instead, and I slipped and fell but it didn't hurt, and I got up and shot it again, and then suddenly the spirit just stopped and went back and did something to the lawyer, I heard him scream and he fell and Mom, I think he's dead, and then the ghost burned!”

“Thank God you're okay,” was all Mary could say, hugging him very tightly. They stopped at a payphone to call the firefighters to the office building before she drove them to the motel, where they gathered up their things and checked out, and then Mary was driving them back to their current home in Maine, still high with the adrenaline of the hunt.

“We saved those people, Mom. I never really understood why people did this, before now,” Sam said from the passenger seat.

Mary smiled at him, and ruffled his hair affectionately. “I'm very proud of you, Sammy,” she said. And she was, very much so. She just wasn't as proud of herself.

  
  
Mary had been teaching Sam first aid and basic field medicine since he was a child, like her parents had done with her. Sam had been patching up his own scrapes and treating his own sprains from training since before he started middle school. For her part, Mary had always patched herself up discreetly after a hunt in which she’d been injured. Being a nurse helped: she was never short on supplies.

One day, Sam was walking back home from high school. He was fifteen and growing taller every month, all awkward limbs and messy hair. He paused when he saw their car on the driveway – she was back later than he expected, and he'd been worrying about her all day. He rushed into their shabby two bedroom apartment. The light in the bathroom was on, white light spilling into the hallway, illuminating the mold-covered wallpaper.

Mary was standing in front of the mirror, swaying like her legs could barely stand her weight. She was trying to stitch, one-handed and looking in the mirror, a long, deep-looking gash on her arm, a cut that went from her elbow almost up to her shoulder. It was bleeding profusely, and Sam saw, in a corner, the discarded bloody shirt and jacket. There was blood everywhere, splattering the sink and dripping down into the tiles to form a growing puddle.

Sam felt faint and he grabbed the doorway for support. She turned to look at him, and her face was pale and drawn with pain, and there was a moment of panic he could see forming in her eyes.

“Sam,” she said, a soft whisper, loud in the silence.

That's all he needed to jump into action. He guided his mother to sit on the closed toilet lid, and took the needle and string from her cold, trembling fingers. He cleaned the wound again and then he stitched her up, his hands surprisingly steady. She groaned in pain a couple of times but she didn’t flinch away. It took him a while to finish, because he was making sure the stitches were perfect.

“Thank you,” she muttered, her voice frail, and that was something Sam couldn’t take. He examined his mother and treated her wounds as best as he could. She had bruises and scrapes all over her body, and it seemed like she'd cracked one or two ribs. She had a nasty bump on the side of her head, already swollen.

“Do you need the ER? Shall I take you there?” he asked her. She'd been teaching him how to drive recently, and he thought he could probably manage it. He was tall enough to look sixteen.

“No. I'm OK for now. Thank you very much for your help, Sammy.”

Sam nodded, feeling suddenly the fear and panic coming back, and morphing quickly into anger.

“What the hell happened, Mom? What did this to you?” he asked, his voice coming out embarrassingly high.

Mary shook her head, looking worn out. “Sam,” she started to say.

Sam interrupted her: “You promised me you were fine on your own. What happened?”

She sighed. “They took me by surprise. I didn't see them coming, they were too fast.”

“Take me with you,” Sam blurted out.

Mary looked up at him, startled.

“You've been training me for years now. I know as much as you. I’m strong, I'm a good shot. You can just have me there as backup. I can stay in the car and wait for you, and I'll only come out if you need help. That way I can be there if anything like this happens again.”

 _When it happens again_ , Sam's treacherous mind thought.

“Sammy...” Mary said, with a sad smile on her lips. “I don't want you to come with me. It’s dangerous, and if you’re not prepared-”

“Yeah, I know. You said. But Mom...” he paused, taking her hands in his. The hands that had embraced and caressed him and pinched his cheeks to annoy him now seemed small, frail, the hands of an aging woman. “Mom... I don't want you to get hurt. Not when I can help you and watch your back.”

Her smile was now all loving and awed, and Sam’s feeling of sick dread started to fade away.

“Okay,” she said. “But you will follow all my orders, without hesitation, no questions. Understood?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me, young man. Go get dinner started, I’ll join you in a while,” Mary said, still smiling at her son.

 

For a couple of years now, Sam’s daydreams had been all about college: rolling green lawns filled with laughing students, enormous lecture rooms, lunches in the cafeteria with a group of friends, roaming through the endless stacks in a large, bright library, exams and classes and parties. He imagined a life unburdened by all he'd learned traveling and hunting with his mother - a normal, safe life. In his fantasies, his Mom had a job nearby and he'd go visit her on weekends and they'd talk and make dinner together, like in the best-remembered days of his childhood. He never considered what he wanted to study. He could go for anything - English Literature, History, Law, Medicine, Physics – because the very idea of settling down in a place filled with interesting young people who knew nothing about him, a life devoted to learning and having fun… that was all he wanted.

Sam spent the last part of his senior year of high school in a small town in Montana, where Mary had promised they would stay until his graduation. His honors History teacher seemed to take a liking to Sam and tried to encourage him to apply to big-name universities, telling him about grants and scholarships, giving him all kinds of informative pamphlets. So one day Sam took the pamphlets and application forms and placed them on their rickety dining room table. His mother looked at the Stanford and MIT pamphlets in surprise.

“Is this what you want?” she asked, an unidentified emotion in her voice.

Sam steeled himself, and nodded, cautiously.

Mary walked around the table to her son and kissed his forehead.

“I still can’t believe you’re graduating high school. My baby. I’m so proud of you,” she said, hugging him.

“But… Mom… can I? I mean, what about hunting?” Sam asked.

Mary looked away, considering the possibilities. “I think it’s a good thing for you to go to college. I want you to have a future away from this life. You’ll need to be very careful, and so will I, but I think we can work something out,” she said, and smiled at him with pride and love. Sam hugged her back.

His dreams seemed about to come true. He wasn’t even too shocked when Jean Baker, a pretty blonde girl he was always looking at in class, readily accepted to go to prom with him. They danced and laughed and for one night in his life, Sam felt like a normal teenager.

And then, a few weeks afterwards, Mary came back late one night, bruised and battered and trembling. Sam ran to her side, asking, “Mom! What happened? Are you alright?”

Mary looked at him with such a sad expression that it gave Sam chills. “Pack your things. We're leaving tonight,” she ordered, and stepping away from him, walked straight to her room and started packing.

Sam felt completely dismayed. What about his acceptance letters? What about Jean?

“What? Why?” he asked.

“I'll explain on the way. But right now, we have to go. Move, Sam!” she ordered, in an urgent, almost desperate tone. Sam moved, quickly and efficiently reducing the mess in the house to the few essentials they needed to take with them.

Mary drove fast, glancing nervously at the rearview mirror every few minutes. Sam hadn't seen her like that in years.

“What's wrong? Why did we have to leave so suddenly?” he asked, afraid of the answer.

Mary's mouth was a thin, tense line. “There was a demon in town,” she said. “I've been following its trail for months. It was careful and hard to find.”

“So what happened?” Sam asked, impatient.

“I found it,” she said.

“Did somebody die?” Sam asked, but Mary would say no more on the subject.

Sam sulked the rest of the way. There was nothing Sam found as irritating as his mother's stubborn silences on certain subjects. He'd long ago learned to accept them, but that didn't mean he liked them.

A few days later, when Mary had judged they were far enough to slow down a little, Sam called his History teacher. He would say they had left town for a family emergency, and didn’t know when they’d be back, and he would give one of his mother's P.O. boxes so the teacher could forward his acceptance letters, if he got any.

Before he could say anything, though, Mr. Williams was speaking hurriedly, calling him by his current alias, “Kyle! Thank God you called. I haven’t been able to reach you. There’s something I have to tell you. I don’t know if you heard. Jean Baker’s in hospital. The doctors don’t know if she’ll make it. I’m so sorry.”

Sam was speechless for a long, terrible moment. “What? What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know. The police suspect a mugging. She was found at the entrance of the county hospital, badly beaten up.”

“Oh my God. That's… that’s awful. I- I won't be able to come back in a while, but – could you keep me posted? If anything. If anything happens,” Sam said, choking on the words.

Mr. Williams called the next day. Sam picked up the phone and locked himself in the motel bathroom, even though his mother had gone out to get dinner.

“They told us just a few minutes ago. Jean’s awake. She’s very disoriented but the doctors say she’ll be fine,” he said.

Sam breathed a long sigh of relief and sunk down into the closed toilet seat.

It took a while to reach Jean, through annoyed nurses and well-wishing friends at her bedside, but he finally managed it. Her voice sounded painfully hoarse and slow when she answered.

“Jean! How… how are you doing? What happened? It’s - sorry. This is Kyle. I'm really sorry I haven't been around. I had a family emergency,” Sam said, stammering.

“Kyle? Kyle who?” she asked, sounding confused.

“Kyle Jenkins. We went to prom together,” Sam replied.

The line was silent for a few moments. And then she said, in a soft whisper, “Kyle? The new guy? But...”

Sam felt shaken, even as he told himself this was surely a side effect of her injuries. He made his voice as friendly and warm as possible, as he tried to remind her, “Yeah, we met in honors History class. We hung out in the bridge, had ice cream, watched a few movies together. I’m tall, wavy brown hair, you told me I have puppy dog eyes. Remember?”

“No, no,” she kept repeating, but Sam pushed on, driven by an irrational desperation:

“You kissed me on prom night. We were dancing to a slow song, and you were wearing a navy blue dress, and I told you-”

“'It matches your eyes',” she whispered, softly.

Sam stopped short.

“I remember,” she whispered, in a scared tone, like she was sharing her most shameful secret. “Not all of it. Like a nightmare. I was… it was moving my body, speaking with my mouth, and I couldn't do anything to stop it,” she said, and started to cry with raspy, choking sobs.

“Prom was… it was supposed to be my special night, so... it let me watch. And that thing... it liked you. It wanted you. It was so - so proud of itself… And I hated you so much,” she said.

Sam could hear her falling apart on the other side of the line, and he felt completely powerless in the face of it. Another part of his mind was reeling with the realization of what had happened… and what it meant.

Several people came into the room. Sam heard their hurried steps and concerned voices. Then someone took the phone from Jean and said, angered, “Whoever you are, leave Jean alone. Do not call again,” and they hung up without waiting for an answer.

When Mary came back that evening, Sam was waiting for her. He was sitting on the bed, the room in shadows. As soon as she saw him, she felt her stomach drop.

All his life, Sam had obeyed his mother and accepted her vague answers and refusals to speak about certain things. But tonight there was something new and dangerous inside of him, a desperate, savage determination. Mary knew it as soon as she saw him.

Tonight, Sam would have the truth.

 

 


	4. Chapter 3

 

Afghanistan was nothing like Kansas. No familiar flat, rolling fields extending as far as the eye can see, a landscape of green and sunflowers and corn. Afghanistan had green fields and breathtaking views but it felt dangerous, inhospitable, a spiteful mix of arid dusty plains and rocky, treacherous mountains. On his first deployment, a few years back, Dean had been awed by it all: the people, the kids running by the side of the trucks on the small towns, the lakes he could glimpse behind two hills, when flying in. Now, on his third deployment, he was used to it, the initial sense of adventure long gone, and sometimes it seemed that the place was out to kill each and every one of them.

It hadn't actually been as bad as he imagined when he got his first mobilization orders and realized he'd be going to war. Back then he'd imagined Vietnam, like in the movies and his father's rare stories about his own time there. Days patrolling in humid heat, an invisible enemy waiting to ambush you when you least expected it, death and desolation in every step. So during his first deployment, he'd been surprised by the lack of action. There were occasional missions where his team helped secure an area of a half-deserted city, a few unexpected gunfights and far more expected attacks, but it was mostly grunt-work, just being present, patrolling and keeping everyone safe.

Of course, by his third deployment, he’d seen people die, the country didn’t seem to be getting any more pacified, and he mistrusted the place more than ever. Perhaps it was just the low-level stress of never knowing when something would happen, but he felt twitchy and nervous as he made his patrols. At least there was a certain routine to it, which he was grateful for. He went out on patrol, did as he was told, came back and spent his free time watching movies or helping the mechanics fix the vehicles. All in all, he didn’t think it was a bad job. He had money and benefits and he’d even been taking college courses.

It was evening and the sky glowed orange, reflecting in the dust around them, making the whole place glow for a while. Dean was at the garage as usual, playing poker with the mechanics, Lucas, Mackie, and Wells.

“So, Wells, if I win this hand, will you finally give in and go out with me?” asked Dean, throwing Wells his most charming grin.

Wells was a pretty black girl who was probably the best mechanic in the unit, temporarily “attached” to them as she was. She had also turned down every single one of Dean’s advances, much to his chagrin. She grinned back at him, cockily. “As if, pretty boy. You're playing with the pros, here,” she said.

A minute later, everyone groaned as she collected the cigarettes they'd been betting.

“That's it, I'm out,” said Lucas, and they waved him out, as he went to call his family.

The others stayed there for a while longer, passing the time until dinner, talking rumors from back home and the army.

“You're so full of shit, Mackie,” Wells was saying.

“I swear it's God's honest truth,” Mackie, wide green eyes in an earnest face, assured them. “I was in his unit before I got transferred. He lifted a whole damn truck with his bare hands to save a guy's life.”

“Did you actually see it? With your own eyes?” Wells pressed.

“Well, no, not me.” At Wells' satisfied expression, he hurried to add: “But my buddy Jerry saw him do it! He's the one who told us about it.”

“Jerry? That your buddy who got drunk and tried to lift one of them burkas off a woman? Almost got his ass arrested?” Dean interrupted.

“Well, yeah, but-”

Dean and Wells shot a look at each other. Mackie raised his hands, giving up.

“Okay, don't believe me, whatever.  It's not the only time he's done it, apparently.”

“Yeah, well, there's some who say they saw Osama hiding out under their bed, we don't believe them either,” Wells said, grinning.

Dean lit a cigarette, and was about to add something, when a voice came from the garage entrance.

“Dean?”

They almost jumped up in unison, backs straight and salutes ready, before they saw who it was, face in shadows but shape outlined by the fading sunlight.

“Shit, Gutierrez, you almost gave me a heart attack,” Wells complained.

Jose Gutierrez was a medic for Dean’s unit, a short, thin young man with a fluff above his lips that he liked to call a mustache. He was quiet and kind, more prone to praying in his cot than to exchanging vulgar jokes before bedtime. Chucho, a street dog that the whole unit had fed and adopted, trotted by his side, and came in to the garage to receive everyone's petting and cooing attention.

Feeling the stare on him, Dean looked up from smiling at the dog into Gutierrez' face. His expression was starkly different to Jose's usual easygoing grin. He was staring at Dean intensely, like he was trying to drill a hole in his face with his eyes. Dean felt a sudden shiver of recognition, and he got up and walked up to Gutierrez. Or, to the being wearing his face at the moment.

“Cas?” he whispered.

There was a subtle, pleased look at Dean's recognition, but it quickly faded into Castiel's usual expression: grim and deadly serious.

Dean turned with a fake smile to the others. “I'll see you later, guys,” he said, and he dragged Castiel towards a mostly empty corner of the camp, shadowed by the garage and the silent supply warehouse.

“Cas? What's going on?” whispered Dean, worry creeping up his stomach.

Cas looked at him in confusion.

“Come on, don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. You only show up when bad things happen.”

“This time I wanted to be early. Just in case,” said Cas' emotionless voice.

“Jesus. What's going to happen, Cas? You have to tell me. People could die,” said Dean, feeling chilly, despite the heat of the daytime still burning through the soles of his boots.

“People die all the time. Especially here,” said Cas, with an uncomprehending tone.

Dean gritted his teeth. The last time he'd met Castiel, he and another soldier had been caught in a nasty crossfire. They tried to get to cover but something exploded under their feet, and when Dean regained consciousness, he was charred but unharmed in the infirmary, Cas' penetrating eyes staring out at him from Gutierrez' face. The other soldier had died in hospital a few days later.

As always, Cas seemed to miss the point, honesty or deliberately, Dean wasn't sure. Dean responded to Castiel’s confusion with some pissed-off staring of his own, which seemed to confuse Cas even more. He frowned, still staring, and Dean had to break off to blink a few times.

“Dean, I understand how you feel. Losing your fellow soldiers is never a good feeling. But it is not given to me to choose whether they live or die. That is not my job. And even if I was allowed to, I don't really know much more than a time and a location to be there. I am never given many details,” he said, looking perhaps a bit guilty.

Could an angel feel guilt? Dean had no idea.

“Yeah, yeah, you're just following orders, you never have any explanation,” Dean said, sighing.

Dean spent the rest of the day and the next morning jumpy and nervous. He'd heard about infiltration attacks in other camps, some Afghan national army soldiers going past security and opening fire at anyone they could get before they were taken down. He eyed suspiciously the small group of Afghan officials talking to a couple Marine sergeants at the entrance to the camp, and the next morning he jumped when someone dropped a wrench as they were readying the vehicles.

When the time came to set out, he wasn't surprised when he saw Cas heading straight at him, oblivious to the fact that he had to ride in the medical vehicle. He grasped him by the arm and took him to Private Jackson, one of the drivers.

“Would you mind trading places for today? Riding the Humvee, manning the gun? I’ll take your place driving because I, um, I need to talk to Gutierrez about something. Something, you know, personal,” Dean asked, with a bashful sort of smile.

Jackson gave him a sly grin. “Fine, Winchester. But you do know you can always go to the infirmary for herpes treatment, right?”

Dean just shrugged and gladly took the driver’s seat in the medical vehicle, sitting Castiel at his side.

They were going on a fairly routine mission, a patrol through one of the mountain villages, to check out some intel about Talibans settling back in the mountains in their area. It was further away than regular patrols and the mountain paths always made everybody wary. And Cas' presence by his side was making the journey nerve-wracking for Dean. In order to keep his cool, he tried to engage the angel in conversation.

“So how's it going? Any news from the heavenly front?” he asked.

Cas looked at him as he tried to parse Dean's meaning.

“Why are you asking this? I believe you are not familiar with my garrison, or indeed, any of the heavenly hosts.”

“It's called ‘small talk’. You know, asking stuff about the weather, the family, the job. You're not meant to take it all that seriously. It's just to break the ice. Seriously, how many years have you been around? How can you not know this?”

“I merely observe, and there are many things that I do not understand. Human emotions and interactions can be difficult to comprehend. They can be quite... indirect, at times.”

“I guess, yeah, I mean, you're the most direct dude I’ve ever met. You don't spare a guy's feelings.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don't remember? That time when I had the motorcycle accident. At the hospital. You didn't even stop to think before you blurted out… you know.”

“I believe I asked, ‘Why do you want to die?’ It was a fair question, wasn't it? I really didn't understand.”

“It's just not something you blurt out to people.”

“But it was true.”

“Whatever,” Dean said, feeling uncomfortable. All of his interactions with Castiel always ended up like this. But as awkward as it was, it was refreshing as well, such honesty and sincere confusion from someone who wasn't judging you, just trying to figure out what you were.

In a way, Castiel's words had always helped him. When he was a child, at the abandoned factory, and when he'd had his accident, his words had made Dean realize things he'd been hiding from himself. Painful as it was, it had helped him survive.

He just didn't know how to tell this to Cas.

“So indulge my curiosity for a while, man. What's it like, being a soldier of Heaven? Like, what do you do? What are your superiors like? What's your rank? Are you like, an officer, or enlisted?”

Cas appeared to be deep in thought, reflecting on the question. Dean stared out at the winding mountain path ahead of him, and veered to avoid a pothole in the unpaved road.

“I don't know if it's comparable to your own situation. We were all created to be what we are, and we have been so for many thousands of years. I have many superiors, but I belong in a fighting garrison and there are other angels who carry out duties that are considered, well, inferior. And I have acquired a certain autonomy and decision-making, at least in my current mission.”

“So you're like, what, Special Ops?”

Cas looked at him in befuddlement. Dean just shrugged. They were rounding a curve, a steep drop below them, and he needed all his concentration to drive.

Just then, a loud boom shook the earth around them, and loose stones from the ridge above drummed down over the vehicle. Dean cursed loudly and swerved to avoid colliding with the Humvee that had abruptly stopped in front of them. A mine had exploded on the path. Dean saw the first truck in the convoy burning in a cloud of dark smoke, voices hollering around it. Suddenly the sound of gunfire broke up around them. Dean readied his weapon for combat. The soldiers were already taking up their positions, returning fire in the direction of the shooters.

Suddenly another explosion shook the mountainside, and Dean looked back to find that something had exploded at the rear of the convoy, showering rocks on their vehicles and on the path, effectively blocking their retreat.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. And then there was a third explosion, this time above their heads, and boulders rained down on them. One of them fell just beside the truck, smashing the driver's side door. Dean jumped back, and pushed Castiel out from the other side.

“Get out! Take the pack!” Dean ordered Castiel, who took a second too long to stare at the medical pack Dean was flinging in his face.

Dean jumped out beside him, rifle cocked. A pair of boulders had fallen on the armored vehicles, and the men were spreading out, taking cover, and firing at a post above them, and in the hill in front of them. There was black, heavy smoke billowing from the burning vehicle, and dust flew on their faces from the recent explosions. Around them rang hollered, rapid orders and the rattling sound of gunfire.

“Medic!” someone called, from the head of the convoy.

Dean steered Cas towards them, guarding him as much as he could with his body. One of the soldiers that had been in the first vehicle needed first-aid. Dean pushed Cas towards the fallen man, and at his confused look, hissed, “Just do your fucking job, Cas! Or let Jose do his job! I’m not going to have people dying because you insist on being my bodyguard. I’ll stay here, just GO!”

Dean joined the men in front of him, firing at the post in the hills in front of them and guarding the wounded soldier. He turned back quickly and noticed with relief that Cas was treating his injuries, as quick and efficient as Jose.

The radio officer turned to them: “Air support is on their way! Hold your positions!”

And then an explosion nearby left his ears ringing, his head fuzzy as he looked up into the dusty cloud that was starting to obscure their vision. They were being attacked with mortar rounds, and one of them had struck a few feet away. Among the chaos and confusion, Dean noticed one thing - a young soldier on the ground, clutching a bleeding stump where his leg had been, directly in the line of fire. He was moving before he was aware of his decision, covering the fallen boy with his body as gunfire hit the ground around them.

As he struggled to move the boy back into cover, get him near Cas, he felt the bullets hit his back, one by one, the impact enough to throw him against the boy’s body. He couldn’t move the last few feet - there was a dull pain in his hip and his right leg was not responding. He saw Cas’ emotionless eyes before him, hauling him to safety, Dean still clutching the boy with all his strength. Another mortar round exploded in the place where he had just been. Everyone dived to the ground. Distantly he heard air support arriving, firing at the post in the hill in front of them. Slowly, the gunfire dwindled to a halt. In the sudden silence, the last thing Dean saw before losing consciousness was Gutierrez’ face, looking at him with a worried expression. He couldn’t tell if it was Castiel or Jose.

 

He woke up in hospital, hours later. Gutierrez came up to him. The nervous, tight smile in his face told Dean that Castiel wasn't there anymore.

“So, hey... what happened?” Dean asked, voice still slurred from the pain meds.

“You got shot. There’s like, a dozen bullets embedded in your vest. Kevlar got most of them but you got hit in the hip, beside your spine, and a couple bullets on the right leg, around the knee. No major arteries hit. You’re a really lucky bastard,” Jose explained, sitting by his bedside.

“I got the angels on my side,” muttered Dean. Jose looked at him sharply, and whispered back, “You sure do.”

There was a loaded pause, before Dean croaked out, “You remember? About…”

“Castiel,” Jose said the name as if afraid that saying it out loud would invoke him somehow. Dean froze for a moment. This was the first time in his life that anyone had known about Castiel. It felt strange, almost forbidden.

Jose shrugged, uncomfortable. “He came to me in a dream one night. Asked permission to be a vessel. Said my collaboration would be properly rewarded. I don’t know, I don’t remember much. It was a dream, you know? I said yes, because it seemed like an interesting dream. And then I’d have these blackouts where I lost time, a mission where I didn’t remember what happened. You’d be there, always. At first I thought I was going crazy, you know?”

Dean nodded, but couldn’t think of anything to say. There was a very long pause, as Jose fidgeted with a golden cross he had around his neck.

“My grandmother used to tell me about angels, and saints, and the Virgin. And I prayed every day, and believed in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but… it’s different, somehow, when they exist. It’s like… it’s not the same,” Jose finished, giving up on explaining himself properly. Dean thought he understood, but...

“I was never much of a believer,” Dean said, slowly.

“I know,” said Jose, nodding. “Which is strange, considering…”

Dean tried to shrug and felt a sharp pain go through his back. “Ow. Yeah. Tell me about it.”

“Don’t move, Winchester. You’re seriously injured,” Jose admonished him, in his doctor’s voice.

After a few moments of silence, Dean asked: “So what’s going to happen now?”

“I’m not sure. You’re not fit for duty, not for a while. There’s talk of shipping you back home. Maybe you could get a medical discharge. If you’ve served out your contract...” Jose answered.

“I don’t know if there’s anything back home for me,” said Dean, without really meaning to.

“There’s your Dad, right?”

“Yeah. But I don’t think it’s me he wants to come back home,” Dean confessed.

Jose didn’t know the whole story, but he didn’t ask. He just looked at him, and said, “My father died without forgiving me for joining the army. I think maybe he never understood. He just kept repeating, ‘What else do you need? Why do you want to risk your life for a country that’s not even your own?’ He worked so hard all his life, just to bring us to the country, get us the permanent residency. For him, it was enough if I worked in his brother’s business, had children born as citizens. He never understood why I wanted to become a doctor, why I felt the need to give something back. And you know what? I was too proud to talk to him and explain. I regret that now.”

Dean sat in silence for a long time, after Jose had gone back to his duties. John had been proud and supportive of his decision to join the army. He’d even told him some stories of his own time as a Marine. Dean had seen the fear hidden in his smiles, and still John had let him go. He remembered being very young, just after Mom and Sammy disappeared, and watching his father hunched over some books, his large back bent over, making him seem smaller than he was. Dean had called to him but John hadn't listened. The feeling of loneliness of that moment had never really gone away.

  
  
In spite of his reservations, being back in Kansas felt good. The rolling fields, farmhouses, and haystacks were the backdrop of his childhood. The smells were sweet and inviting, the trees and streets below them lit up with the glowing oranges and reds of autumn. Lawrence felt bigger now, compared to his childhood memories. The house was in dire need of a coat of paint and a few repairs, but he actually looked forward to getting them done before winter in the company of his father.

He hadn’t called to say he was coming, in part because he’d wanted to surprise his father, and in part because he hadn’t wanted to commit to the visit. But as he unlocked the door and entered the house, he could feel that it was empty. The house was silent and dark. He felt a pang of disappointment, as he recalled his father’s frequent weekend journeys.

The Impala was still in the garage, carefully covered with a sheet of plastic. His father had given him the keys on the day he graduated, which had been a complete surprise to Dean. He spent some time tuning-up the engine and checking the car before he went to clean and do a few much-needed repairs around the house. His doctors would be rabid if they saw him, but Dean needed the manual labor to keep his mind occupied and relaxed.

By evening, when it became clear that John was not coming back, Dean decided to call him. The call went directly to voicemail, and Dean sighed. _He’ll be back tomorrow_ , he told himself. Two days passed in this way: Dean busied himself around the house while he waited for his father. He called in the morning and in the evening and every time it went to voicemail. Dean left him messages but by Monday John hadn’t returned or called him back, and he was getting worried.

He went up to check John’s room. He expected to find it littered with empty liquor bottles, but instead there were newspaper cuttings lining the walls, discarded clippings and papers overflowing from the wastepaper basket. There were books on esoteric topics like spirit guides and astrology and ghosts stuffed in the closet along the clothes. There were notebooks in John’s desk filled with indecipherable notes, dates and places, the handwriting chaotic and obsessive. When he opened the desk drawer to find the expected half-full whisky bottle, he felt something underneath the drawer. Bending down to look, he found a key taped to the bottom. It was a simple, small key, with a tag attached to it.

A little bit of searching got him to a self-storage facility on the other side of town. “Dad's gone crazy. Absolutely, completely fucking _insane_ ,” was the first thing Dean said when he opened the door to the unit and took a good hard look at the contents.

If Dean had thought his father’s room at the house was the mark of a hopelessly obsessed man, this was a whole new level.

There was an old cabinet, a bookshelf crammed with books, a desk, a large working table with tools neatly arranged above it, and a chair. There were several maps pasted to the walls and covered with tacks and post-it notes. But the first thing Dean noticed were the sawed-off shotguns at the working table, an old hunting rifle, and a collection of what looked to be home-made bullets, some of the shotgun bullet casings filled with - strangely - salt. There were hand-made knives and daggers that seemed to be made of silver. There was even a wickedly sharpened machete in the corner.

In the cabinet there was a box wrapped in iron chains and covered in strange symbols, which gave off a really bad vibe. There were herbs and gems and large bags of table salt. The desk was covered in newspaper clippings, more recent than those he’d seen in John’s room, and most of them were about gruesome, strange deaths and murders. In the desk drawer there were a few envelopes with brand new credit cards, all with different names. He looked at the books in horror: there were cryptic Latin tomes on who-knows-what, old books about demonology and dark spirits, and hand-made guidebooks talking about shapeshifters and skinchangers. Looking at the maps more carefully, Dean discovered that some of the events on the newspaper clippings were marked out with a tack, but he couldn’t make sense of any of it.

By the end of the afternoon, Dean was more worried than ever. Crazy and obsessed was one thing. But John seemed to be crazy, armed, and messing with things that were illegal and possibly dangerous, to him or other people.

He took a deep breath. It was time to call in a favor from his old friend Tommy Jones. As a communications officer in the army, he might be able to help track down John’s phone records. After that, Dean had no idea what he could do. But he needed to find his father.

 

***

 

Stanford University was just as lively and beautiful as Sam had imagined it years ago. Enjoying the warm September sun, the recently arrived students were walking around the broad campus, talking in groups or couples under the shade of the trees, and playing frisbee on the wide grassy areas.

Walking beside him, Mary saw his son looking around with a worried expression on her face. They made their way to Green Library, where they gave their fake IDs at the entrance to the Special Collections archive. The middle-aged man in charge smiled warmly at Mary, and she took the chance of flirting with him a little before handing him the request form.

“Ah, yes, some of our oldest manuscripts, very precious, there aren't many remaining copies, at least not ones accessible to the public. You are aware that we require a few extra precautions?”

Mary and Sam nodded earnestly. They sat side by side, turning the old pages slowly and delicately as instructed. Mary made a few notes in her diary, scribbling in her usual shorthand, while Sam read and transcribed the old Greek in his head. They found what they were looking for a while later. Sam pointed at a paragraph and whispered, “Here. The description fits: the claws, and the burning eyes, and the name. Summoned by a spell. Killed by a consecrated iron sword to the heart.”

Mary looked at it with a sharp, focused look, and smiled triumphantly. She read the passage carefully, then gestured at Sam to turn the page. They kept reading the legends surrounding the creature, but there was no more useful information in the book, and Mary got up and went back to the librarian. Using her most winning smile she told him, “We're done with the first volume. We’re ready to start with the second.”

The man looked stricken for a moment. “I, uh, well, I'm afraid it's not possible.”

“Why?” Mary asked.

“We… we're really not supposed to be divulging this yet, but...”

“Yes?” Mary leaned in closer to the man’s face.

“It was stolen,” the man whispered. “We're still not sure how it happened, but we noticed it missing about two weeks ago. The police are investigating, but they haven't found anything yet. I'm very sorry. It still hasn't made it into the electronic records, which is why you were able to request it, but... I apologize for the inconvenience.”

“That's a real shame. I hope they find it soon,” Mary said. She waited until she and Sam had left the building to speak.

“It was stolen from here, then. They've kept it a secret, I guess it's embarrassing for them. Whoever summoned the creature must have stolen the book a few weeks ago,” Mary said.

“And now it's out there, killing people. I think we should go back to the last victim's friends. They were all Stanford students, weren't they?” Sam said.

“I believe so, yes.” Mary shot his son a teasing smile. “Why don't you take care of it? I remember one of the girls was staring at you quite a lot.”

“Um, really? I didn't notice,” Sam replied, shrugging awkwardly. “What are you going to do?”

“Well, now we know what it is and how to kill it, I find we're in need of a consecrated blade. Will you be okay without the car?” she asked.

“Wait. What are you going to do? You're not going to try to steal anything from a museum again, are you?” Sam asked, worried.

Mary smiled up at her son. “I made one at Ralph’s, actually. An iron sword. I just need to get it consecrated. Don't worry about me. Worry about yourself, okay? Try to find out who might have summoned the creature, but don't do anything until I'm back. Please be careful. This creature won't be easily beaten.”

“I know, Mom. I think a couple of the girls we talked to yesterday live nearby. I'll track them down and see what I find out. Give me a call if you need anything.”

“Yeah, you too, Sammy. Take care.” She stood on tiptoe to give him a light kiss on the cheek before she left.

 

His mother was right when she said the creature would be hard to beat, Sam thought as he was smashed against the wall, feeling the creature's elongated claws sink into his shoulder. He stabbed his silver knife into the creature's flesh, as the round orange flames burning where its eyes should be fixed on him. The knife barely left a graze on the oily, tar-like flesh, and Sam had no option but to run. At least the two surviving girls had made it out of the room.

He hadn't counted on finding the girls distressed and whispering among themselves. He followed them to a house where they had a pretty serious black magic altar set up in the basement. Apparently they had summoned an ancient, hellish creature to take revenge on a common ex-boyfriend, but they hadn’t imagined it would come back to kill them one by one. As they made a desperate, last-ditch attempt to banish the creature back to wherever it came from, it appeared in the middle of their circle and attacked.

Sam hadn't intervened on time to save the pretty blond girl. He almost tripped over her body on his way out of the basement, slipping on the blood pooling in the floor. He heard the creature moving after him, crawling over the walls, and he barely had time to shield his face as the banister beside him collapsed in a shower of splinters.

He had taken a moment to send off a quick message to his mother, but he didn't know how soon she could get here. He'd already emptied a whole magazine into the creature, and it hadn't so much as blinked. The silver knife hadn't had any success either. At this point, Sam was starting to doubt if a consecrated sword would do much damage either.

As a last resort he picked up a piece of the broken banister that ended in a sharp point. Sprinting up the stairs and turning into the hallway, he looked back but there was nothing in the narrow staircase that led to the basement. He realized what was happening a split second before he felt the creature's claws ripping into his back. He jumped out of the way but then the creature slammed into him from above. As it brought him down crashing into the floor, he plunged the improvised stake deep into the creature's mouth. It let out an eerily high cry of pain as finally Sam hit something solid inside the gelatinous flesh.

“SAMMY!”

He saw the figure moving towards him from the corner of his eye, and gathering his strength, he kicked the creature with the full force of his legs, managing to dislodge it from his body, and into the well-aimed blade in his mother's hands. The creature didn't even have a chance to turn around as it was stabbed straight in the center of its head.

Sam was panting, choking, spitting blood. His vision was darkening and he couldn't stand up. He felt his mother's hands brush his hair, and move quickly over his body, checking for any serious injuries, before they moved away. He knew his blood loss was considerable, and he'd probably need a hospital very soon. He stubbornly held on to his rapidly fading consciousness, and as he turned his head, he caught a dream-like vision of his mother bent over the creature's body, carefully cutting it open and taking something out from its chest, black oily blood spilling all over her hands.

  
  
He woke up in hospital the next day, barely aware of where he was. Mary was by his side in a second, brushing his hair away from his face.

“Hey, Sammy. You're going to be okay.”

Sam moaned in answer, the pain reawakening in his back and arms. Mary shushed him and fluffed up his pillows, fussing over him like when he was a child. When Sam felt he had enough strength to open his eyes, she smiled at him softly for a moment, before her face became more serious. She gripped his hand so tightly it hurt.

“Sam. What you did was very stupid. How many times have I told you before? You don't go into these things without warning, without backup, without _me_. Understood?”

“S'ry, Mom. I- had to,” he croaked out, remembering the terror in the girls' faces, the cry the girl had let out when the creature had slashed her open.

Mary's face softened, and she whispered. “I know.”

When Sam got out of hospital, he was surprised to find Mary driving them not towards the crappy motel they'd been staying in, but to an apartment building. He turned to his mother in confusion and she smiled at him.

“I rented a small place in here. Two bedrooms, not too big, but it's pretty cozy and inexpensive.”

When Sam just kept staring, Mary started to look a bit unsure. “I thought... well, Stanford is a really good university. And we did go through a lot of trouble to get those Stanford IDs, and California is nice this time of the year... I thought we could make the most of it, stay here for a few months. What do you think?” she asked in a quiet voice.

Sam huffed out in irritation, and shrugged. “You know you don't have to do this. It was my choice not to take the full ride to Stanford I was offered. I've told you, I just wouldn't be able to live a normal life, knowing you're out there hunting that demon, putting your life on the line without anyone to watch your back. _I can't_ , Mom. You don't have to feel guilty about it.”

Mary was silent for a few moments. Sam waited, knowing patience was the one way to get her to open up. Finally, she released her firm grip on the steering wheel, and sighed.

“I've already signed the lease. We can leave now, but we'll lose the cash advance I gave the landlord,” she said and turned to him, waiting for his decision.

Sam ran a hand through his long hair, feeling newly rattled. Sometimes he was more irritated by his mother's acquiescence than he was by her secrecy and stubborn refusal to share her plans.

“Fine,” he said at last. “It's already done. I guess we can stay for a while, but as soon as we need to, we'll move out. We might be recognized in relation to the hunt, or we might need to chase a new lead anyway.”

Mary nodded. “Of course.”

Without further discussion, they both got out of the car and began the already familiar routine of establishing a new temporary home for themselves.

Sam got a weekend job in a bar downtown, while Mary found a temporary placement as a nurse in a clinic. It wasn’t any different than other towns they'd lived in. Mary did her own research during her off hours, while Sam, at the insistence of his mother, took all the university courses he could get into. Many undergraduate classes at Stanford were very largely attended, and as the semester was just starting, no one batted an eye at a new face in the back of an Introduction to Criminal Law class. The libraries were also well stocked and accessible to anyone with a passable fake ID.

Sometimes, when a group of friends walked past him on campus, chatting and laughing, he felt a pang of envy and regret at the life he could have had. For years, he’d been trying not to make friends wherever he was, telling himself it was for the best, but a part of him still longed deeply for someone to talk to about trivial, everyday stuff. And after more than a month living in the same place, it was hard not to get noticed. Sam had already been invited to hang out with a couple of guys from his Spanish class, and a very pretty girl in one of his Law courses noticed him looking and smiled at him. Sam looked away but it was too late. She approached him after class before he could slip away unnoticed.

“I've never seen you around before,” she said, catching up to him. She was tall, her long legs keeping up with his stride effortlessly.

Sam smiled back at her. “Yeah. I recently moved here from Texas,” he said, using their current cover story.

“Oh, you don't have much of an accent,” she said.

“I've moved around a lot.”

“Oh, really? So, where have you lived?” she asked him, with a wide smile that made her look prettier.

And somehow that was all it took. Her name was Jess, she was majoring in Art but she wanted a minor in Law. She still hadn't decided what to do after graduation. Sam knew he shouldn't get involved, he knew it more was dangerous for her than it was for him. But she was fun and easy to talk to, and whenever he was with her, he didn't think about the yellow-eyed demon that was after him and his mother.

One day he was out with Jess and a group of her friends, having french fries after class, listening to them complain about one of their teachers. When his phone rang he jumped up out of his chair immediately, startling the girls around him. He didn't pay them any mind, already walking out to a secluded spot.

“Mom? What's going on?” he answered, frowning.

“Hi Sammy. Don't worry, I'm fine. I just wanted to tell you: Bobby called a while ago, he's got a book he'd like me to take a look at.”

“Is it about...?” Sam asked, not daring to talk about it over the phone.

“He didn't say, but I don't think so. He said he wanted my opinion on something, that's all. I don't think it'll take more than a week, mostly to go there and back.”

“I can go with you,” Sam offered immediately.

“It's not a hunt, Sam. You don't have to. I know you're having a good time at Stanford. And I know you don't like Bobby all that much.”

“I never said that! He's a good guy. And he's been helpful. I just don't like the way he stares at you.”

Mary laughed. “He is a good guy, Sammy. Don’t worry. Listen, I'll take the car, I'll look at whatever he wants help with, and I'll come back in a week, maybe earlier. If I need you, I'll give you a call. And if I find out something important, I'll tell you about it.”

“Mom-”

“Sammy. I know how you feel. But I've told you: you need something to look forward to. A future you can build for yourself. For after.”

“Yeah, and what about your future, Mom?” Sam asked.

Mary didn't answer. “I'll call you when I get there,” was all she said before she hung up.

“Girlfriend troubles?” one of the girls asked him when he came back. “My mother,” he replied, shortly. He tried to get back to the inane university chatter but it kept going over his head.

 

Mary called every day, as was her habit whenever they were apart. Sam answered on the first ring and grilled her for every detail he could get out of her. It did seem like the book Bobby had was interesting, although it was in an old Greek dialect and hard to translate. Mary commented that now that she was there, she'd take a look at a few other new tomes Bobby had, and revisit a few old ones.

He was determined not to worry, just as he knew Mary was determined not to worry about him in Stanford. That is, until the eighth day passed by and Mary hadn't called. Sam called her once in the break during his shift, and twice after he left the bar. Mary's phone was disconnected. He didn’t even think about it, he called Bobby immediately.

“Where is she?” was the first thing he said when Bobby's gruff voice answered the telephone.

“What's this? Who're you? Are you aware what time it is?”

“Bobby. You're always up until dawn. My mother's phone is disconnected. Where is she?” Sam asked, patience thin.

Bobby snorted into the phone. “Sam Campbell? That you? Mary left yesterday night. She got a call that made her look very worried. Didn't say much, she just got her stuff and left in a hurry. She even forgot her notes. To be honest, I thought it was you calling her.”

“Do you any idea where she might have gone?”

“Sorry, Sam. I didn't hear the conversation. When she came back, she was all pale and nervous, and said she had to go. Hardly said goodbye.”

“Shit! Listen, I'm going to call our contacts, see if anyone knows anything, but let me know if you get any news, okay?”

“I will. Take care, Sam.”

He was trembling, mentally prepared for days of searching, calling every contact they had to find his mother, but he got lucky. Bill Harvelle answered cheerfully: “Yes, it was me who called her. What's happened?” Sam explained briefly.

“That's strange for her. She hates the very thought of leaving you out of her sight for a few hours. It was just a regular check-up call. Just to know how you both were doing, keeping her up to date with hunts, you know. She never calls unless she really needs something. I like to stay in touch.”

“Bill, what did you talk about? Can you remember exactly? Tell me everything you remember. Every single detail.”

“Whoa, that's a lot. You know I hardly even remember what I had for breakfast.”

“Please. I need to know,” Sam said, a hint of desperation in his voice. Bill sighed. Sam could picture him, sitting in his wheelchair behind the bar at the Roadhouse, scratching his beard.

“Okay. I asked her how you were – she told me you guys were in California, having a good time. Explained a bit about the hunt that you took back there. We talked family for a bit – couple new guys that Ellen tried to shoot, Jo wanting to go to college. She asked about any new hunts I'd heard about. I told her about, let's see... a possible haunted house in Virginia, some disappearances around a swamp in Florida...  an apparent case of demonic possession, which she obviously wanted to know about.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Well, I don’t know the details. Ellen got a call from Caleb about two weeks ago. Said he’d be taking it, along with a new buddy of his.”

“Did she say anything about that hunt?”

“She wanted to know who the new guy was. Couldn't tell her much, I've never met him. Just told her Caleb's known him for a few years, goes by the name of Winchester.”

“Was that all?”

“Well, she asked if we’d heard from Caleb since then. I said no. And then she said she had to go.”

Sam sighed and ran a hand through his hair. Mary never took just any hunt. The ones they did take, he knew, were always for a reason, even if Mary didn't always share it. And she had _promised_ never to go on a hunt without his backup. If she had broken contact, if she had decided to go without a word to him... Something was up. Something not good.

“Caleb’s demon possession. Do you know where it was?” Sam asked.

Twenty minutes later, he was packed and casually walking around, choosing the best car to hotwire. He took or destroyed all damning evidence left in the apartment. The rest, well... he didn’t expect to be coming back.


	5. Chapter 4

 

The evening light shining through the opaque windows cast long shadows on the abandoned warehouse. Sam stepped carefully through it, flashlight in hand, examining every dark corner for any clue that would tell him what had happened here. There were rubber marks on the pavement outside. The warehouse door hung on its hinges, broken. Inside the warehouse, there were bullet holes in the walls, signs of a violent physical fight, like overturned and smashed crates and shelves. In the ground were the reasons for the suspected Satanic connections: a half-finished devil’s trap and a scuffed and trod-over salt circle with a large blood spatter inside it.

It was the second day since he arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska. He'd made the trip from California in thirty-two hours and arrived at noon, sweaty, exhausted and red-eyed, having barely slept or eaten on the way. He'd gone directly to Caleb's place, as described by Bill Harvelle, but found it locked and empty. He had knocked and waited for half an hour, and he was feeling desperate enough to consider a daylight break-in, when the next-door neighbor had come out of his house and threatened to call the police if Sam didn’t leave, loudly complaining about the “criminal” that lived next to his house, how he just attracted drug addicts and delinquents and bad sorts. The ranting man slammed back inside his house but Sam saw him peeking out the window, keeping a careful watch, and he decided it was safest to leave, for the moment.

He changed tactic and hit the newspapers, and after a few hours he found a reported shootout in a warehouse ten days ago. The police suspected a gang fight, the tabloids speculated about Satanic cult connections. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Trembling with fear and exhaustion, Sam forced himself to stop, rent a motel room, and crash in the bed for a few hours. At dawn the next day, he woke up from a terrifying nightmare, and got right to work.

A shower, shave, a rented suit and a fake FBI badge earned him access to the police report, and the confirmation that there had also been a female agent asking about the incident three days ago.

So now he was at the scene of the shootout, knowing that his mother had probably been there at some point, but frustrated and failing to see what had drawn Mary's attention so desperately to this hunt.

As he was turning to leave, he saw a shadow moving near the doorway, and swiftly hid himself among a stack of empty shelves. There was someone stepping carefully through the debris and the salt circle at the entrance. A man, tall, muscular, stiff pose, confident movements. Sam's hand went automatically to the holy water flask in his jacket.

The man moved further into the warehouse, looking around warily. Sam sneaked through the shadows, getting closer. As the man turned to examine the far wall, where smashed crates had been stacked over each other by the police, Sam opened the flask, and pounced.

He took the other man by surprise, and had him in the floor in seconds. Sam checked his eyes, which were open in surprise, green with long lashes, definitely not pupil-less black. Before he could react to this, the man had thrown him off in a deft move, and Sam found himself in a reversed position, pushed into the floor with the man's arm over his throat. He started muttering an exorcism, which had no reaction other than the guy frowning in puzzlement and digging his arm further into his windpipe. Out of breath, feeling the edges of his vision starting to blur, Sam hit the man in the side of the face with his one free hand, and pushed with all his weight. As soon as the other man was off him, he stood up in a swift movement, watching as the other guy composed himself just as quickly.

For a moment they both stood unmoving in the silent, darkening warehouse, panting harshly, watching each other warily, ready to resume the fight.

“What the FUCK was that?” the other guy asked. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Sam observed him. Civilian clothes. His right leg moved stiffly, like it had been wounded at some point. No reaction to holy water or exorcism, so he could rule out a demon. So what was he doing there?

He decided to be blunt: “Are you a hunter?” he asked.

“Huh?” the guy replied, frowning.

So: not a hunter. Rubbing his throat, Sam straightened out, and took out his fake FBI badge.

“Sorry about that. Agent Kyle Adams, FBI. I'm investigating this incident. We think it might be related to a dangerous crime gang with Satanic cult tendencies,” he said, adopting his official cop persona.

“Why the fuck did you attack me, then?” the guy asked.

“I, uh, I confused you for someone else. I’m sorry,” Sam said.

The guy relaxed his guard somewhat, rubbing the side of his face. “Ow. And what was the splashing and the weird muttering for?”

“Well. I really confused you with someone else. One of our suspects. Very, uh, superstitious.”

The guy still looked at him warily, so Sam carried on, trying to sound more confident. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

For the first time the guy looked shifty. “I was, er, just nosing around,” he said.

Sam shot him a look that said, _yeah, right_ , and the guy looked a bit guilty. “It's a long story,” he said.

“I'd like to know,” Sam told him, as he walked out of the warehouse. The other man hesitated a moment before following.

Outside, he handed Sam a small photograph of a middle-aged, bearded, dark-haired man with gloomy eyes. “That's my father. He's been missing for more than a week.”

“And you think he was here?” Sam asked, pointing at the warehouse.

“Well... I found his truck a few blocks away from here. It seems it's been parked there for a few days at least.”

Sam was listening intently. “I'm sorry, what's his name?” he asked.

“John Winchester. I'm Dean,” he said, as an afterthought, and they shook hands briefly. Looking at his face in the remaining daylight, Sam felt something rare -  a fleeting sense of recognition, like déjà-vu. The look in his eyes was familiar – honest, desperate, reflecting a deep strength, an unwillingness to give up. Dean’s clothes were rumpled and sweaty, and he had dark bags under his eyes. He looked much like Sam felt.

“You say his truck's nearby. Can I see it?” Sam asked. Dean looked unsure for a moment, then nodded and led the way.

It was a shiny black monstrosity, the kind that Mary would have advised against in the name of discreetness. It looked like a well-kept truck, but the fine layer of dust covering it indicated it had been there for some time.

“I don't have the keys,” Dean said, as Sam circled around the truck, looking through the windows. The cab seemed pretty bare, no more than the essentials. He noticed that the bed was covered and seemed well-locked. He picked the lock carefully.

“What are you – are you picking the lock?” Dean asked, as Sam opened the tailgate. False floor, not very deftly done. He had it open in a second. Dean gasped as Sam revealed a very well stocked weapons compartment. Definitely a hunter's, Sam mused, as he observed the silver daggers, salt rounds and sawed-off rifles.

“Can I open the cab? Just to take a look,” Sam asked, perhaps belatedly. Dean nodded, still looking at the weapons.

As he picked the cab door, Sam wondered what kind of a hunter didn't tell his children about monsters.

The cab was bare except for a water bottle, empty styrofoam coffee cups and snack bar wrappers. In the glove compartment there were a handful of road maps and a turned off cell phone. Sam handed the cell phone to Dean, who took it and turned it on. All his messages and voicemails flashed onto the screen.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

“Where do you think your father might have gone without his truck?” asked Sam, as Dean was still shaking his head at the cell phone.

Dean ran a hand over his cheek, looking frustrated. The exhaustion was plainly visible on his face. “I don't know. I've called the hospitals, free clinics, even visited some myself and asked around. He's not in any of them.”

Sam nodded. Winchester was Caleb’s new hunter friend. They had gone after a demon, and something had clearly gone wrong. But what? Both of them were missing now, Mary after them. He needed to find out exactly what Caleb had been hunting, and what had happened after the shootout.

He looked at Dean, who was staring balefully at his father's abandoned truck. A son in a desperate search for a missing parent. Even if he clearly had no idea what his father had got up to.

“Listen,” he told him. “I'm going to go check Caleb's house. He's, uh, one of the people we’ve placed at the shootout. I believe your father might have known him. Would you like to...? I mean, I could use your help. Perhaps you'll recognize something I won't.”

Dean looked at him for a while, assessing him. But then he nodded. “Okay. Where's your ride? I'll follow you,” he said.

“Um. I was going to take the bus,” Sam said. He'd abandoned the hot-wired car as soon as he got to Lincoln, like his mother had always instructed him to. It was convenient but he couldn't risk going to the police with a stolen car.

“Huh. So you Feds are really feeling the budget cuts.”

“You've got no idea,” Sam said, relieved.

“Let's take my car then,” Dean said, pointing back to the street they'd came from. They walked back side by side.

“Wow. Nice car,” Sam said, appreciatively.

“Nice? She's beautiful,” Dean said, with a fond smile on his face. Sam felt a sudden, unexplainable warmth in his gut when he saw that smile.

 

Under the cover of night, Sam picked the lock to Caleb's house. It was harder to break into than a normal house, but luckily for him, the bolt and a few of the locks were already broken. Armed with flashlights, they inspected the house, which had been turned upside down. Tables and chairs were upturned, drawers and cupboards were open, their contents spilled out over the floor. Inside the house there had been not only a thorough and frantic search, but a fight, Sam noted as he saw a smashed glass cabinet.

There was a very large weapons stock in the basement, behind a large framed picture. The weapons were still gleaming in their places.

“Is that a M72 LAW?” Dean said in awe, touching the bazooka.

But Sam was looking at the floor, where a large devil’s trap was drawn with spray paint, and Sam immediately recognized his mother’s curved sigils. He crouched on the floor to examine it closely. There were traces of water, grains of salt, and a few drops of blood around the trap. He knew what it meant: Mary had trapped a demon, and had attempted to get answers out of it.

“What the hell is that?” Dean asked, approaching Sam. He just shook his head and got up to inspect the book collection in the corner, which had been taken out of the bookshelves and dumped in a pile on the floor. Good volumes, not nearly as extensive as Bobby's own collection or the Campbell's. He was looking around for any case notes when Dean joined him, opening some of the books at random.

“Now I know this guy and my dad were definitely best buds,” Dean said.

“Hm?” asked Sam, more concentrated in a folder full of newspaper clippings he'd found hidden at the back of the bookshelf.

“ _Evils of Witchcraft and other Devil Works_ , _Spirits of the Dead_ , this thing that's in Latin... the same type of crazy books my father had in his secret storage unit. What the _fuck_? Is this some sort of fetishist fanclub of the occult? Let's grab a few beers, conjure the devil, go out shooting people?”

“Yeah. Crazy,” said Sam dryly, as he examined some recent newspaper cuttings about a series of grisly, unsolved murders in the city. This looked to be what Caleb had been investigating, but it would surely take a few days of research to get a clear idea of what had happened. It was probably high time to hack into the local police database. Sam hoped they were the kind of police force that kept electronic records. Otherwise he'd have to be extremely convincing as Agent Adams to gain entry to so many case files.

Feeling that there was no more to be gained from Caleb's place, Sam pocketed the cuttings and got up to go.

He heard the safety go off, and he turned around slowly to face the muzzle of a handgun trained directly at his chest.

“Let's cut the bullcrap, yeah? You're not a Fed. Your impersonation isn't just felonious, it's ridiculous,” said Dean, with a hard look in his eyes.

“Hey, I'm really not at my best these days,” Sam said, shrugging. Dean's eyes were tracking every single movement.

“I want the truth from you, and I want it right now. Do you hear me? I don't have the time to be playing games. Do you know where my father is?”

Sam sighed deeply. There was no easy way out of this. “Fine. _Fine_. You want the truth, I'll give you the truth,” he said, wondering if he'd end up with a bullet to the head for this. “I am, as you say, part of the fetishist occult fanclub. Only we don't conjure demons and spirits and monsters. We hunt them down and kill them.”

At Dean's disbelieving look, Sam added: “And no, I don't know where your father is. But I’m also looking for someone. And if you want to find your father and help him, you better start to believe me.”

Dean shook his head slowly. “This day's just getting better and better. So, you're saying demons are real.”

“Yeah. And ghosts. And werewolves. And shape-shifters. And witches. And a bunch of other nasties you wouldn't even recognize,” Sam said.

Dean snorted. “And you’re part of a secret group of people who hunt them and kill them.”

“In short, yes.”

“And you want me to believe that,” Dean said, dryly.

“You can believe what you want. But from what you've told me, your father certainly believed it. And shooting me won't help you find him. So, if you're not going to shoot me, I'll be going after the demon or demons that Caleb and your father were hunting. You can come with me or not. It's your choice,” Sam said, as calm as he could.

After a few moments, Dean lowered the gun.

“Very well, Kyle. I think I'll go with the crazy for now. Is that even your real name?”

“No,” Sam answered, as he walked briskly to the entrance of the house, Dean following him closely.

“Are you going to tell me your real name?” asked Dean, in a pissed off voice.

“It's Sam,” he replied, the words heavy on his tongue. It was the first time in many years that he shared his real name with a stranger. It felt important.

“Sam... Sam Adams?” Dean asked, with a small, teasing smile.

“Let's go,” said Sam, sneaking discreetly out the door, wary of the nosy neighbor that might still be up at this hour. “I've got some hacking to do.”

  
  
Sam had fallen asleep with the laptop half-closed beside him on the bed. He felt the heat in his dreams, as the flames licked their way from the ceiling to the walls, like a flower opening, his mother in the middle of it, hair burning down, red dress torn open, blood dripping down into his face as he screamed in vain, struggling against a force that kept him captive...

He woke with his heart beating painfully in his chest, feeling short of breath. It took a while for him to notice the knocking on the motel room door. Dean was outside, with eyes like he'd only had a few hours of sleep, but perfectly shaved, showered and prepared for the day.

Sam himself must look terrible, he guessed at Dean's look. His hair was a mess, and he'd slept in his clothes and looked it.

“Do they teach that in the army?” asked Sam, drowsily brushing his teeth, still trying to get the images of the nightmare out of his head.

“Teach me what?” Dean asked.

“You know,” Sam said, vaguely pointing at all of Dean. “Early in the morning, ready to go.”

“Oh. Yeah, kind of. It's a habit that stuck,” said Dean, smirking a little at Sam's grumpy face.

They discussed the case with take-out breakfast bagels, Sam eating small bites and talking a lot about the case files he'd managed to gather from the police database while Dean devoured his two bagels in five minutes.

“You should eat, man. For a big guy like you, you don't eat too much,” Dean said, wiping cream off his face.

Sam shrugged and gave a half-hearted bite to his bagel.

“So, from what I understood, which was not so much, you still have no clue on who we're following, and where they've gone. Is that correct?” Dean asked.

“Well, I've got an idea who Caleb was following, but...”

“Red Mustang 1986, probably a hatchback,” Dean said.

“What?” Sam asked, his thoughts interrupted.

“The police are looking for it in connection to the warehouse shoot-out. They recently found a witness, a homeless man who saw a Red Mustang fleeing from the scene.”

Sam was speechless for a few seconds. Then he asked, “How did you get hold of this?”

Dean looked guilty for a moment. “I've been listening to the police scanner,” he said.

But Sam wasn't paying attention any more. “Oh, that's good... I can definitely track that down... it'll take a while but if I cross-check with Caleb's suspects...” Breakfast forgotten, Sam went back to his laptop.

Dean busied himself with the police scanner, and then cleaning his gun methodically. By the time he was finished he was still restless, so he got up to examine Sam's arsenal, in an open duffel bag by his bed.

“So: salt. Lots of it. Salt and guns and silver daggers. Is that a thing?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah,” said Sam, looking up from his typing for a moment. “Salt's good for spirits and demons. Keeps them out. Silver's the only thing that kills werewolves and shape-shifters.”

“No wooden stakes for vampires?” Dean asked, sarcastically.

“No, you have to cut off their heads. Not that I've actually decapitated a vampire myself.”

“Huh. So, what about angels?” Dean asked.

Sam stared at Dean, forgetting his laptop. “Angels?” he asked, confused.

“Yeah. You know. You told me you've seen demons. What about angels? Ever seen one?”

“Don't be ridiculous. Angels don't exist,” said Sam, going back to the police database.

“Huh,” was all Dean said.

  
  
At four in the afternoon, the sun shining on corn crops and grassy meadows around them, Dean was driving the Impala through route 77 towards Sioux City. They'd had a break about an hour ago: a red Mustang '86 was found abandoned in the outskirts of Sioux City. Police sources, not public yet, indicated the presence of blood in the trunk. Sam didn't want to think what it meant, but it was a definite lead to follow.

“God I _love_ this country. Green, fresh winds, good roads, no mines blowing up in your face. It's heaven to drive in here,” Dean was saying, window open to let in the autumn breeze.

Sam snorted. “You clearly haven't been in New Mexico.”

“Nor planning to either. I've had enough of desert landscapes to last me a lifetime.”

“That bad, was it?”

“Afghanistan? Yeah. That bad. And more. You have no idea.”

Sam stared at Dean, curiously, for a moment.

“What?” said Dean, glancing at him.

“Nothing. It's just... I mean. At least you had a choice. You volunteered for it, didn't you? Why?” Sam asked.

Dean shrugged, casually. “I enlisted before 9/11, you know. My childhood friend Tommy wanted to enlist, asked me to go with him. At the time, my father had sold his car repair shop, and I didn't get on so well with the new boss. Got myself fired. So I was looking for new opportunities, and the recruiter made it sound perfect: some years of service to the country in exchange for a good insurance, college, good pay. I didn't know I'd be shipped off to war just a few months afterwards. Even if I'd known, I might have still enlisted,” he said, looking straight at Sam, defiantly.

He just nodded, thoughtful. “So, you got a college degree?”

Dean turned to smirk at him. “Yep. Film Studies.”

Sam let out a disbelieving laugh. “What, really? Why? What are you going to do with that?”

Dean shrugged. “No idea. I thought I could work in Hollywood, you know? Film crew. You'd get to meet the stars and all. It was a nice fantasy.”

“It's a cool idea,” said Sam, looking out the window.

“So what about you?” Dean asked.

“Me?”

“How did you end up, you know... doing whatever it is you do?”

Sam shot his companion a bitter grin. “Well, I really hadn't much choice. There's only two ways you become a hunter: either you're raised into it, or something shitty happens to you, like your wife getting possessed by a demon.”

Dean looked at him contemplatively. “You look a bit young to have been married.”

“I was raised into it. Like pretty much the rest of my family,” said Sam.

“So it's... what, a family business?”

Sam laughed, mirthlessly. “You could say so.”

“Well, it's all the rage nowadays. I’m a mechanic son of a mechanic, and soldier son of a soldier,” Dean said, winking at him.

“Hunter son of a hunter,” Sam said, grinning back.

“So tell me, Sam... who are you looking for?” Dean asked, in a very casual tone. Sam instinctively felt his defenses go up.

Before he could decide whether to lie or tell the truth, his phone started to ring.

They both froze for a moment, and then Sam snatched up his discarded jacket to get at his cell phone.

He answered while making motions at Dean to stop the car.

“Hello?”

“Sam?” his mother's voice, crackling on the other side of the line, made a deep shuddering breath pass through his body.

“Mom?” he answered, relieved and more desperate than ever.

“Sammy, where are you? Are you okay?” came her voice, anxious and rapid.

“Mom, where are _you_? Are _you_ okay? Tell me and I'll come to you,” said Sam, breathless.

“I'm fine, Sammy. Listen, I'm so sorry I haven't been calling. A situation came up, something very delicate, and I-”

“Mom, please, where are you? I've been looking for you for days, I-”

“Listen to me, Sam. Go to Bobby's place, or Bill's, if you have to. Wait for me there. I'll call you when I've solved this-”

“No! Mom, we agreed. You promised. We're in this together, okay? You can't just go off without a word or tell me to wait while you’re in danger, not anymore! Mom-” Sam's tone was pleading now, but he didn't care.

“I know, Sam, but please understand: I need you safe, and-”

“Can I at least know what's going on? Why are you keeping me in the dark?” insisted Sam.

“Sammy, I-” Mary's voice sounded small, and lost, and Sam ached with the need to go to her. “I'm sorry. I can't tell you right now. We're being watched, Sam, we're being followed, I'm risking a lot making this phone call-”

Dean, who'd been listening to the conversation with increasing awkwardness, had stopped the car in the shoulder and was rubbing his neck. Finally, he made a gesture to Sam, who was too focused on the phone call to see it.

“Sorry, man, I'm gonna go... take a piss, or something,” Dean said, opening the driver's side door and stepping out. Sam nodded absently.

“Sam? Is someone with you?” Mary asked suddenly, never missing anything.

 _So now I have to tell **you** everything, don't I?_ , a very childish, petulant voice in Sam's head said.

Instead, he sighed audibly. “Yeah, the son of Caleb's hunter friend is looking for his father. He’s got a car, so… And before you ask, yes, he’s not possessed, I checked. We're on our way to Sioux City.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“Mom? Are you there? What's wrong?” Sam asked.

When she finally spoke, Mary's voice was hoarse and shaky. “NO, Sam. Do _not_ go to Sioux City. Go to Bobby's place. Take Dean with you. Do not let him out of your sight,” she said.

“Mom-” but before Sam could get another word in, Mary had hung up.

Sam cursed freely for a few seconds, gripping the cell phone like he was trying to strangle it.

When Dean came back to the car, Sam was staring at the cell phone in complete disbelief.

“She hung up on me,” he said, fingers still trembling from leftover adrenaline. “My mother. She hung up. On me,” he said.

“So I gather she's the person you're after? Did she tell you where she was? What are you going to do?” Dean asked, hesitantly.

An idea struck Sam. “It sounded like she was calling from a payphone. She wasn't using her cell. If it's a payphone, I can track it down,” he dove into the backseat for his laptop.

Twenty frenetic minutes later, Sam had an address in Manhattan, Kansas, and he didn't even stop to think about it. “I'm going there,” he told Dean. He knew Mary wouldn't be pleased if he disobeyed her orders, but she'd sounded more than worried – she was _afraid_. Sam only had one thought in his head, and it was: _get to her, NOW_.

Dean wasn't convinced, though. “We've come this far already. I need to see what happened in Sioux City. It's just... I need to know,” he said. Sam understood.

“It's okay. I can hitchhike or take a bus. Give me your number and I'll let you know if my mom knows anything,” he told him, shouldering his duffel bag and laptop case.

Sam watched the black Impala drive on northwards before he set off at a brisk walk down the road, thinking he might be able to get a lift to Lincoln and hot-wire a car there. The need to get to his mother was so strong he almost felt like taking off at a run. The first three cars that passed him on their way south ignored his raised thumb.

There was something bothering him. Dean was a soldier, and Sam was sure he was well trained and experienced in combat, but... he was in no way prepared for demons, especially if he didn't believe they were real at all. _I just feel uneasy at leaving a civilian alone_ , Sam told himself. But at the moment he had other priorities. The longer he took to get there, the farther Mary would be from the street pay phone from where she'd called Sam. What was she trying to do? Was she after the yellow-eyed demon? What exactly had she told Sam? He'd been too focused on hearing his mother, alive and scared, on the thought of finding her immediately, that he hadn't paid much attention to her actual words.

A truck that was passing by honked and stopped by the side of the road. Sam ran to catch up to it.

“Going anywhere?” the trucker, all stained fingers and yellowing teeth, asked him.

Sam hesitated. It wasn't really because of the way the trucker was staring at him. It was more to do with what he'd been thinking. Mary's last words before she hung up on him. And then he realized it.

“Never mind,” he told the trucker, and turning around, started heading back north.

 

Three people were dead. Dean was really getting a bad feeling about all this. First he learned his father was crazy and armed to the teeth. Then he learned he wasn't the only one. And now, less than an hour after arriving in Sioux City, he found out that three bodies had been discovered in an empty house, right in the area where the Red Mustang was found. Two young men and a woman. He didn’t know any more details.

Dean considered doing like Sam and passing himself off as a police detective or a federal agent. He contemplated the task of once again calling hospitals to ask about his father, and a wave of despair threatened to choke him. His cell phone rang, distracting him from his thoughts. He didn't recognize the number, but it was Sam's voice on the other end.

“Hey, so... I've just arrived in Sioux City. Come pick me up?” he said.

Dean readily accepted, and started the car again. Perhaps Sam would have a way of getting more information from the police.

When Dean picked him up however, it seemed Sam had other plans: “We have to get to Kansas, as soon as we can,” he said.

“What? Why? Hey, aren't you even going to try to find out what happened here?” Dean asked, incredulous.

Sam shook his head. “Right now, the more important thing is to get to Kansas. Or we won't be able to catch up with my mother.”

“I thought that was what you left to do. What happened?” Dean asked.

Sam jiggled his foot nervously against the floor. There was really no rational way to explain his actions, he was acting more on strong intuition than anything else. “My mother knows where your father is,” he offered, as the best way to get Dean on with his plan.

“What? How?”

“I don't know how. But I'm confident she knows. We have to find her, soon,” Sam said, a bit of the desperation he was feeling creeping into his voice.

Dean hesitated for a long moment. If he was being led around, manipulated somehow... But then again, three dead people, all of them identified as young, so probably none of them were his father… The police were looking for a murderer. If John had indeed been in Sioux City and was still alive, he must have skipped town already. And there was something in Sam’s expression that he couldn’t ignore. He had felt bad at leaving Sam by the side of the road, and there was something in his gut telling him to follow Sam, that Sam would somehow lead him to the truth.

“Fine,” he said, turning the car around and heading for the freeway. “Let's go.” And pressing down on the accelerator, he started driving back south.

  
  
Sam had traced the call to a street phone cabin in Manhattan, Kansas. He knew that Mary wouldn't be there when they arrived, but still he insisted on driving around town, checking motels for Mary's car. A couple of false alarms later, they stopped at a late-night diner to have some much needed food and discuss where to go next. Sam was familiar with his mother's methods of misdirection, and he knew that even if two or three towns she stopped by were in opposite directions, she'd eventually choose a safe place to hole up in. But where? They had several safe-houses across the country, but none of them were nearby. If she was hunting something, where would it be? If she was running from something, where would she go?

He was still trying to figure it out when Dean poked him with his fork, pointed at his half-eaten pie.

“Aren't you going to finish that? It's a crime to let pie go to waste.”

“You can have it, if you want,” Sam offered, still absorbed in his thoughts.

Dean pulled the plate up to him and started eating. After a while, he said, “So. Your mother. I take it she’s a, well, a hunter?” he asked.

Sam nodded.

“What about your father? D’you have any other family?” Dean asked.

Sam looked uncomfortable at the topic. “Never met him,” he said curtly. “I have some cousins in Louisiana, I think, and an aunt and uncle who disappeared a few years back,” he added.

“Oh,” Dean said. He finished the pie in silence while Sam took out a map and studied it intently.

“So what's her name?” he asked, finally.

“What?” Sam asked, distracted again.

“Your mother's name,” said Dean.

“Mary,” Sam answered absently. He was wondering if she'd have gone to the bunker in Michigan, or the one in Alabama, so he missed Dean's sharp look.

They paid the bill and returned to the car in silence, Sam still undecided on where to go next. Dean, however, started to drive to the east. Sam looked up from his map questioningly.

“Where are you heading?” he asked.

“Home,” said Dean.

 

***

 

Mary arrived in Lincoln in a state of panic. _Maybe you’re jumping to conclusions_ , she told herself. _Maybe it’s another hunter going by the name of Winchester_. But it was too much of a coincidence. What if it was true? What if it was John, her John, hunting demons, of all things? She knew it wasn’t strange to lose contact with a hunter for weeks, months or even years, but the fact that Bill hadn’t heard from Caleb since his call two weeks ago was worrying her.

She arrived past midnight, and went directly to Caleb’s house. She had never met him, but she hoped the Campbell name would at least convince him to talk to her. But after a few minutes of knocking, it became clear that nobody was home. Making a show of leaving for the benefit of the next door neighbor who was staring through the curtains, Mary parked the car a few streets away and doubled back, picking the window lock and sliding inside the dark and silent house. Before she could examine the house, however, she was attacked by a girl with black eyes. Mary fought fiercely, and as the fight moved around the house, she noticed that the intruder had been opening drawers and cabinets, looking for something.

 _I could try the dagger_ , Mary thought. But no. Only as a last resort.

She retreated to the basement, where she set a trap for the demon who barreled in to find herself splashed with holy water and trapped in a salt circle. Mary had quickly drawn a devil’s trap around her. The demon was grinning at her cheekily, but lost some confidence when Mary took out the holy water, the salt… and the dagger.

“You will tell me what you were doing here, and what you know about Caleb and the other hunter that was with him,” Mary said, voice steely.

Two hours later, she had the description of a place in Sioux City, a story of how Caleb and his friend had stumbled onto something much larger and sinister than they had imagined, how they had to erase their traces before other hunters got word of the plan, along with many taunts about her son’s tainted blood and evil nature. It wasn’t the first time she interrogated a demon, and she knew that at least half of what they said was a lie. Her description of Caleb’s friend, however, fit John perfectly.

Mary exorcised the demon back into hell. The girl was badly hurt and in a state of shock, but alive, so Mary helped her outside, using the door this time and locking it behind her as best as she could. She called 911 a few streets away, and watched safely hidden as the girl was taken away in an ambulance.

The next day she investigated a shootout from the previous week that matched the incident described by the demon. It all pointed to one thing: Caleb and John had come into a hunt expecting one demon, and had found themselves outnumbered and outmatched. If there were no bodies in the morgue matching their description, and if the demon had been telling the truth… they had been taken.

She was aware that it was rash and stupid, and that she was very probably walking into a trap, but Mary couldn’t stand the thought of John tortured, hurt, murdered by the very things she had been trying to protect him from. That night she drove to Sioux City, found the house the demon had described and watched from a safe distance. It was a house with a foreclosure sign up front and boarded up windows. There were no vehicles parked outside, nor any sign of movement inside the house, but she knew it must be the place.

She also knew that if John and Caleb had been taken, they had been there for days. Demons were bloodthirsty, sadistic creatures: no human could last long under their care. She had to act quickly. And if there was a trap inside the house waiting for her, she thought as she took out the dagger from its sheath, she had a surprise for them as well.

A trash can clanging down the driveway served as a distraction. A young man carefully opened the door and peeked outside. His eyes flashed black as he blinked, looking up and down the street. Mary attacked swiftly, bolting from her hiding place in the porch. She slammed against the man, sinking her dagger into his chest as they tumbled into the shadowy hallway. There was a crackling sound and lightning seemed to flash inside the man’s body before he slumped to the floor, dead. No black smoke came out. The demon was also dead.

She had no time for guilt, because a woman, having heard the commotion, had come into the hallway and was already attacking her. Using her telekinetic powers, she threw Mary hard against the wall. She was ready when the second attack came: she dodged and slashed at the woman’s throat. Her body made a similar crackling sound and lightning bolts went through her body before she fell.

Mary walked warily into the room the woman had come from. She paused at the entrance, covering her mouth in horror, her stomach turning. The room stank. It was a mixture of sweat, blood, human waste, and above all, the stench of death. She heard herself whimper as she recognized one of the figures slumped in the corner. He'd put on weight, his face was wrinkled, he had a beard and graying hair, but he was still the man that had so inexplicably drawn her in all those years ago. John Winchester, her John.

He still had a pulse, barely noticeable under her fingers. His hair was matted with blood, he had cuts and bruises all over his body. One of his legs was bent at an awkward angle. Mary checked to see if his injuries required an immediate visit to the emergency room. That would be very inconvenient and dangerous in her current position.

She turned to the other figure, although it was obvious there was nothing she could do for him. Mary recognized Caleb from Bill’s description. He looked to have been dead for at least a couple of days.

She wouldn’t be able to carry John out of the house, so she took out her holy water and doused his face gently. He opened his eyes after a few moments. She doused him again, making sure to pour some of the water into his mouth. John spluttered and choked, and with wide eyes, looked at her like he was seeing an angry ghost.

“Mary?” he murmured in a very weak voice.

The sound of his voice sent a jolt through Mary's body. She held John while she recited an exorcism, from beginning to end. John was coughing weakly, but nothing happened. Lastly, Mary opened his mouth and put a healthy pinch of salt in it. John choked a bit more and looked at her with glassy eyes.

“Mary?” he repeated, in a suspicious tone.

Mary couldn't let herself give in to the emotions threatening to overwhelm her. She set her jaw and said, “We have to get out of here.”

John shook his head very slowly, like the movement hurt him. “No,” he croaked out.

Mary froze and stared at him, stumped. John had a familiar mulish look in his eyes and the set of his mouth. He looked meaningfully at the holy water in Mary’s hand, and up into her eyes. Mary understood a moment later, and she smiled weakly as she took a large gulp of the holy water, a pinch of salt, and said “Christo” three times, just for good measure. John wasn’t convinced yet, so she took out her small silver knife and cut her hand, letting the blood drip down from the wound.

When she held out her arm for the second time, John took it, and she helped him up, taking most of his weight as his working leg trembled and almost gave a few times. Slowly, painfully, they hobbled out of the house, Mary trying not to look back at the bleeding bodies she had left in her wake.

She would have preferred driving them out of the state immediately but John needed medical attention, so she stopped at a motel in Omaha to take care of John’s injuries.

“I've been working as a nurse for years now,” she informed John, when he shot her a wary glance.

When she had finished, Mary sat back and asked John what had happened. Slowly, with a raspy voice and shiny eyes, he told his story: long years looking for his lost wife and son, how he'd finally found Robert Campbell, found out the kind of things he did. How he'd gone to Missouri for the truth, how he'd immersed himself in the world of restless spirits, demons, and monsters. How he hadn't really believed any of it until the day he came across a ghost. How he met Caleb and Father Jim, how he'd gone on a few hunts with them, and a few hunts by himself, all the while hoping to find any trace, any mention of Mary, even in passing.

He told her about the last hunt with Caleb, how they had been tracking a girl they suspected had been possessed, and how they'd been ambushed by three demons.

“We got our asses handed to us. Slammed against walls, slashed open... we were defenseless. They put us in a trunk, woke up in that room. They tortured us for days, asking what we knew about them… in the end, they were hurting us just for fun. They made me watch while Caleb…” John’s voice broke up and he put his hands over his mouth, and would talk no more.

“Hey… shush. It’s okay now. Rest for a while. I’ll keep watch,” Mary said in a soft voice, rubbing his shoulder soothingly.

The next days were spent almost entirely on the road. Mary didn’t feel safe enough to spend more than one night in a single place. On the road, Mary drove, while she slowly, hesitatingly, told John the truth about what happened on the night she left.

John heard the story in a terrible, stony silence.

“You should have told me,” he said.

Mary shook her head. She forced herself to pay attention to the road.

“I didn't think you'd understand. Not immediately. And I was so scared for Sam. For all of you...”

John's eyes shone brighter at the mention of Sam's name.

“Where is he? How is he? What's he like?” he asked, in a quiet voice.

Mary smiled. “He's wonderful,” she said.

Mary told John about Sam, his concern for helping other people, his intelligence, his strength and stubbornness. John told Mary about Dean, his friends back in Lawrence, how he’d followed his footsteps first as a mechanic, and then as a soldier.

They discussed the next steps to follow. Mary felt that something big was happening, and they needed to act as soon as possible, take the upper hand while they could. But John was still weak and injured, and needed some time to recover. He suggested going back to Lawrence for a few days at least, to stock up on weapons, ammo and amulets from his storage unit, and formulate a plan. Mary resisted the idea of going back, arguing that they’d be easy to find there.

On the third day, Mary gave in and called Sam. She knew there was a good chance that he would trace the call and try to come after her, but she needed to hear his voice, she needed first-hand confirmation that he was alive and well. She hadn’t expected at all that Dean would be with him.

Shocked and fearful, she told John, feeling for a moment every bit as lost as she had the night she left. John put her arms around her in a comforting hug, and hesitantly, pressed his lips against hers. She touched her forehead to his, and he whispered, “Mary. Let’s go home.”

And finally, inevitably, Mary caved in.


	6. Chapter 5

 

Dean had been silent during the whole trip to Lawrence. Sam kept looking at him strangely, but he had apparently decided to wait and see what would happen. They arrived a few hours before dawn, the streets dark and silent.

“This is your house?” Sam said, looking at it when they arrived. Dean nodded. He'd noticed that there was a light on in the kitchen.

“Looks like someone's home,” said Sam, noticing it as well. Dean parked the car on the other side of the street and opened the car door as silently as he could. He saw from the corner of his eye that Sam was pulling out his gun.

Dean took care to enter the house first. The entrance and the living room were dark, and as he stepped quietly through the house, he heard a voice in the shadows call out sharply-

“Stop! Don't move!”

Dean froze and put up his hands in a gesture of surrender, and Sam cried out-

“Mom?”

And then the living room light was turned on. Dean blinked against the sudden brightness, and saw Sam running towards a middle-aged woman with short pale hair. For a moment, Dean thought he must be wrong – it was just a crazy coincidence, this guy named Sam with a mother named Mary who his father somehow knew – when he saw his father behind him, beside the light switch. He was badly injured, Dean noticed with shock, and he was looking at Sam with an expression which told Dean that he wasn’t wrong.

Dean glanced back and the woman – Mary, Sam’s mother – was looking at him with that same expression. Sam kept talking to her but she was not paying attention. She suddenly stepped away from Sam and walked towards Dean, looking dazed.

“Dean?” she whispered.

The feeling Dean had had for the past few hours, an expectant, wary, tense feeling, suddenly broke free, and he could feel his knees shaking, his gut twisted in tight knots.

He looked at the woman before him: her green eyes, full lips, and a face hardened by age and years of harsh living, and he struggled to bring up a memory. He couldn't. He could only stare back at her as she looked up at him in wonder, a bit of fear, and above all – love.

She embraced him before he could say a word, slowly, as if unsure of her welcome, burrowing her head in his shoulders, and she felt so small-

“Mom?” Dean whispered, his voice weak all of a sudden.

Sam watched this scene unfold before his eyes, a kind of vague panic setting low in his gut. A soft touch to his arm jolted him, and the man – Dean's father – was looking at him with wonder and relief and something very much like insecurity. There was so much feeling in that stranger's eyes that it made Sam feel uncomfortable in his own skin. Like a suffering that hadn’t abated in years, and Sam was at the center of it. It was all showing in his eyes, the turn of his mouth, the vulnerable core of this man's soul, a hidden pain bare for all to see. Sam took a step back without even meaning to.

“Sammy,” the man’s deep voice pronounced his name, like a prayer, something he’d repeated over and over, the name rough and tender on his lips, and Sam didn’t know what to say, what to think, and then the man was embracing him fiercely, desperately.

“Who are you?” he wanted to ask the man, even though he already knew the answer.

Dean felt tears run down his face, and he gasped as the words kept ringing sharp in his mind. Dad. Mom. Sam. _My Sammy_.

He embraced his mother for the first time in more than twenty years, and he felt it, the echo of a familiar, much missed, longed for feeling, the memories rushing back.

“Dean…” said Mary, as she wept openly and touched her son’s face. This was the little boy she’d left behind, a man now, and she felt like she was being torn apart all over again, the pain of that day fresh in her chest, an old wound torn open. What could she tell him? How could she explain what she’d done to him? To all of them?

John let go of Sam, feeling his tension, and looked up at him. “It’s true, then. You’re really tall,” he muttered, smiling widely up at him.

Seeing the shock and dumb incomprehension on Sam’s face, he added, softly, “Sammy. It’s John. I’m your dad.”

Sam looked at the stranger claiming to be his father and shook his head. “No,” he said, tightly, and walked out of the house, into the garden, over to the tree in the front yard. A part of him wanted to take off, run away, and never come back. A moment later, Mary ran out to follow him. He turned his back on her.

“Sam-” she started, imploringly.

“Don’t,” Sam warned.

“Please, Sam. I…” And then Mary stopped short. There were no words she could think of to excuse her actions, to ask for forgiveness. “I’m sorry. I...” she whispered, even though it sounded meaningless.

“Who are you? What kind of mother are you? How could you-” Sam hissed at her, turning around suddenly, advancing on her. The next moment he stopped himself and turned his back again, shoulders hunched over and hands covering his face, trying to recover his calm.

“Sammy,” Mary said, voice broken. She touched his arm but he flinched away.

“Just leave, okay? Leave me alone,” Sam said, in a small voice, still hunched over himself.

Mary hesitated for a moment, and then she slowly went back into the house. Sam was sitting with his back to the tree when the door of the house opened again, and Dean came out. Instead of going to Sam, he opened the garage door and went across the street to the Impala, and drove it across the street to park it inside, alongside Mary’s white Honda Civic.

“Sam!” Dean called out to him. “Help me out here!”

Reluctantly, Sam got up and went to give directions as Dean squeezed the Impala into the garage. In the end, there was just enough space for Dean to open the driver’s door and slide out carefully. Sam leaned on the hood of his mother’s car, looking at Dean as he purred at the Impala.

Then Dean opened the trunk and rummaged around until he came up with a flask. He opened it, smelled it, took a sip, and winced.

“It tastes awful but, here,” Dean said, offering it to Sam. Sam took it without a word and took a long gulp, letting the acrid taste of the alcohol scorch his throat.

“Whoa, easy there!” Dean said, taking it from him.

The flask had been half-full, so it didn’t take long to finish it. They stood there in front of one another, Dean leaning on the Impala, Sam on the Honda.

“I don’t even know if that was whisky, tequila, or vodka. I’m never doing that again,” said Dean, grimacing at the metallic aftertaste.

“Yeah,” said Sam, staring blankly at the shelves of tools neatly stacked in the corner.

Dean let himself look at Sam again. He thought he could see his father's angry mouth echoed in Sam's grimace. And his smile, on the rare occasions it came, also lit up his face, like his father's smile. Maybe that was his mother's nose, and his father's hazel eyes. He had forgotten Sammy's face completely, after all those years. He could hardly match the tall guy before him with the few memories he had left of his baby brother.

“I didn’t even know,” Sam said, eventually. “That I had a brother, I mean.” He voiced the last phrase uncertainly, as if he didn’t quite believe it was true.

“You didn't recognize my name,” said Dean, just as uncertainly.

“Yeah. Mom never wanted to speak about the past. She never really told me much. God knows I insisted. And she’s always introduced herself as Campbell. Only to some hunters, though. We’ve always used aliases with everyone else.” He shrugged.

“Oh,” Dean said, not sure if he could ask all the questions lining up in his mind.

“It’s just… You think you know what your life is like. It’s always been that way. And then it turns out you're wrong,” Sam said, slowly.

“Yeah.”

“I don't know what to think. If I should feel angry or happy or sad. I've just no idea.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, and they looked at each other, recognizing the wary kinship that had been building between them for the past days.

“Hey. We should get some rest. Dad was saying something about a meeting in the morning. To, you know, figure things out. You can have my room, if you want,”  Dean offered.

“Nah. I’ll crash in the sofa, I think,” Sam said, the awkwardness creeping back again.

“Okay,” Dean said, and they both made their way in silence back to the house.

 

Sam woke up in a cold sweat the next morning, and rubbed his temples. There was a loud pattering in the kitchen that wasn’t helping his throbbing headache. He entered the kitchen warily. It was Dean taking out pots, pans, and plates.

“Rise and shine, Sam,” he said cheerfully, as he started frying eggs and bacon in a pan.

“Uh,” replied Sam.

“Have some coffee,” Dean said, pointing to the coffeemaker, where coffee was already steaming.

Sam poured himself a large mug and drank it slowly, nursing away his headache.

“Slept badly?” Dean asked.

“Stupid alcohol. Doesn’t agree with me,” Sam replied. “What about you?”

“We didn’t drink that much. I slept like a baby.” Dean grinned.

“So where’s Mom and, uh…?” Sam asked.

Dean busied himself with taking out slices of bread from the toaster. “They’re still sleeping, I think. Maybe you should go knock. It’s the furthest room on the left.”

Sam looked up from the table. “They slept in the same room?” he asked, disbelieving.

“Er, yeah,” said Dean, throwing a strange look at him.

Sam rubbed his face and took a deep breath. He was still not ready for this, but he stood up and climbed the stairs. He hadn’t taken a good look around the house yesterday, but he found the bathroom. Only one room had the door wide open, it had a messed-up bed and the walls were covered in old rock band posters. That was probably Dean’s. Sam opened the next door on the left, and entered a moldy room with stacked boxes in a corner and an old cradle filled with dusty stuffed baby toys.

He stood there for a long moment. Ever since his mother told him about the yellow-eyed demon, he’d imagined the scene many times. It felt strange and unreal to be standing in the very place it had happened. He felt his mother walk up to him before she spoke.

“This was where it came,” she whispered.

Sam tried to imagine the scene: a perfect nursery, a baby sleeping in a cradle, a demon with shining yellow eyes leaning over it, smiling malevolently…

“Mary.” Sam heard John’s voice from the hallway, as he stood in the doorway, not quite stepping into the room.

Sam turned to look back at them. They both wore a similar haunted expression as they looked at the old nursery.

Dean’s voice rang from downstairs, “Come on, breakfast is ready and getting cold!”

“Let’s go,” said John softly, as he shuffled carefully down the hallway. Mary left with a last look at Sam, who stayed for a while longer, staring at the empty crib.

  
  


Breakfast was a stilted, strange affair. Dean supposed normal families did this every day without thinking about it. But this was their first meal all together in a very long time, and it showed. Sam avoided visual contact with either Mary or John. He had apparently decided Dean was the safest choice when asking for the salt or a butter knife. John’s eyes looked suspiciously humid, and he kept glancing nervously at all of them. Mary looked dazed and subdued, and still kept shooting curious glances at Dean. Dean, for his part, was trying his best to pretend this was a normal family having breakfast on a Sunday morning.

After breakfast, when they had cleared the table, they all sat down again as Mary took out her old notebooks. There was an expectant silence as John, Dean, and Sam waited for her to begin. She stared at her crossed fingers over the notebooks for a long moment and took a deep breath, gathering her courage.

“I hadn’t planned on sharing any of this. But now that we’re all here together, there’s no other choice. You have to know. I’m going to tell you everything I know,” she said, gravely.

Briefly, Mary told Dean and John about her childhood, being raised into the hunter’s life by her parents, how she'd hated it and wanted to get away from it. John leaned forward, nodding like her words were confirming something he suspected. Dean listened with a lingering look of disbelief. Mary told them about falling in love with the local mechanic, fighting with her father about it. John smiled softly at that, a small secret smile.

Mary told them of the strange circumstances of her parents’ deaths, along with the large blanks on her memory that still remained. With an empty voice, she described John lying dead in the street, the pact she had sealed with the demon in that moment of despair.

Struggling through the sudden silence, Mary continued her story, telling them how happy and careless she became, thinking she would escape her past, her memory blocked by the demon, or by herself. And carefully she described the events of that night in November, when she'd walked into Sam's nursery to find a demon leaning over the baby's crib, and the decision she’d made.   
  
John drew a weary hand over his face. “I still think you should have told me,” he said. Mary didn’t look up from her position, her face in her hands, energy suddenly gone.   
  
For a moment, Dean felt like a boy again, hurt and confused. Sensing Sam’s gaze on him, he settled his face into a military kind of blankness, all business. “So all these years you've been tracking down this demon, trying to find out what it did to Sam. What have you got?” he asked.

Mary opened her notebooks and composed herself. “I never had much to go on. Over the years, I found a few other cases where mothers or fathers made some kind of deal – I looked for miraculous recoveries from illnesses or fatal accidents. In some cases, the mother died at the six-month birthday of the baby in an unexplained fire. In others nothing out of the ordinary happened. As far as I can tell, all the children involved are perfectly ordinary. But they're all around Sam's age,” she said.

“And what did the demon do to them? Do you know anything?” John asked.

Mary hesitated for a second, glancing at Sam. “I can’t say for sure. The few demons I’ve managed to interrogate have been very reserved about that. I have some theories but… they’re just speculation.”

Sam had an intent look on his face. Mary continued before he could ask. “What I know for sure is that this is big. It’s been going on for decades, it’s been well planned, and there are indications that it may be happening again.”

“So what can we do about it?” Dean asked.

“We kill the yellow-eyed demon,” Mary said, simply. “He seems to be the one orchestrating the whole affair.”

John looked at her in disbelief. “But... demons can't be killed. They can only be exorcised and sent back to hell... isn't that right?”

Mary sat up straighter and gave them a sharp smile. “This is where I have good news. When I started this hunt, I came across an old hunters' legend – a weapon that could kill anything, vampires, demons, gods – anything. A gun made by Samuel Colt himself.”

John seemed unconvinced. “ _The_ Samuel Colt? Do you mean to say he was a hunter?”

Mary nodded. “Believe it or not, he was. I've got the journal and historical records that prove it.”

“Okay. So where can we find this legendary gun?” John asked, leaning forward.

“We can't,” Mary said, with a light shrug. “Believe me, I've tried to find it for years, but I've got nothing.”

“So then, what do we do?” asked Sam, a bit impatiently.

“What I did find was an ancient Kurdish spell, which I suspect was the one Colt used when making the gun,” she said.

Sam's eyes lit up in understanding, and he stood up straighter, suddenly all excitement.

“Can I see it? What does it require?” he asked.

Mary put out a hand to stop him. “It's already done. I've got it here with me,” she said, and with a smooth movement, produced the dagger from the inside of her sleeve. It looked hand-made and polished, but quite ordinary, apart from a few inscribed runes on the hilt and in the middle of the blade.

“When did you make this?” asked Sam, baffled.

“I’ve been working on it for the past year and a half. Some of the ingredients were very difficult to get. And I had to learn metalwork,” said Mary, with a small smirk.

“That creature’s heart,” Sam said, as he pieced it all together. “All those random hunts we’ve been taking. That Ralph guy you ‘dated’ for months, he was a smith. The _sword_.”

“Yes,” said Mary happily, smiling at Sam. Sam wanted to feel angry at her for keeping yet another secret from him but in spite of himself he laughed.

John and Dean seemed a bit lost at his exchange. John cleared his throat and asked, “So, how do we find this demon?”

Mary smiled triumphantly at them. “I have its name,” she said.

Sam looked at her sharply. John and Dean looked confused.

“You didn't tell me this,” said Sam, accusingly.

Mary held up her hands and looked at Sam. “It's extremely sensitive information. I'm sorry, but I couldn't be sure that you wouldn't do something reckless.”

“Now you've really lost me,” said Dean. “I can sort of get the demon thing, and the super dagger there, but what's so special about a name?”

“Names have power,” said Mary. “In this case, the name matters because it can be used in a summoning ritual. We can bind the demon to come to us, at the moment we choose, wherever we choose.”

“So that’s the plan, then? We prepare a trap, summon it, kill it?” asked John.

Mary nodded.

“Wait. How do we know this dagger will work? The spell must have been in one of those ancient alchemy books where you have to translate the words and then figure out what’s a metaphor and what’s not. We can’t face this demon without knowing if it’ll work,” said Sam.

Mary shot John a quick glance. “It works,” was all she said.

Sam looked between her and John for a moment before catching on.

“Oh,” he said, slumping down in his seat.

“I’m missing something here,” Dean said, frowning at them.

Nobody replied for a long moment. Dean looked at all of them but they averted their eyes. Finally, Mary sighed and looked back. “Demons manifest as a kind of black smoke. To act in our world, they need to possess someone. In order to kill them, we have to stab the vessel – the person carrying the demon,” she said.

“So to kill the demon… we have to kill the person it possesses?” Dean asked, horrified.

“It’s very likely,” Mary replied.

“And wait… you said you know it works… does that mean…?” Dean continued, his horror only growing.

Mary just nodded.

“Three dead people in Sioux City. Oh my God. Was that _you_?” he said, staring at Mary, dumbstruck.

“Two, actually. Caleb was killed by the demons,” said John, without quite looking Dean in the eye.

Dean stood abruptly and paced restlessly around the dining room, ranting. “I can’t believe this _family_. Weird-ass books. Unlicensed weapons. Impersonation of federal agents. And now _murder_. And I thought we were just a sad broken family…”

“Dean,” said John, in a pleading tone.

“How different is it than killing enemy soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq?” Mary interjected, suddenly sharp.

Dean looked at her, taken aback. “You’re talking about cold-blooded murder. The war’s different.You get shot, you shoot back. Anyways, if you don’t do something those guys will do terrible things. You’ve no idea how fucking brutal those people can be,” he said.

“This is the same thing! Do you think that demon wants to do something harmless? If it gets what it wants, whatever it is, I assure you, many people will die. The whole _world_ will suffer,” Mary said, very seriously.

“But I’m honestly not even sure that you people aren’t all fucking delusional! Do you hear yourselves? Demons? Vampires? _Spells_? Do you expect me to believe they’re real?” Dean said, raising his voice.

Mary looked suddenly old and weary, sagging against the chair. “If it were up to me, you never would have known. I wish things could have been different. I wish we could have…” She took a deep, rattling breath and visibly composed herself. She went back to her materials and took two small, round metal charms from the pocket of one of the notebooks. They still had wiry strings attached to them. She gave one to John and approached Dean and with a soft, tender touch took Dean’s wrist and tied the charm tightly.

She looked up at him and gave a small, sad smile. “Even if you don’t believe me, accept this as a gift,” she said.

Looking at John, she explained, “They’re anti-possession charms, to stop a demon from possessing you. Please wear them at all times.”

“Don’t you have ones?” said John curiously, as he fingered the charm.

Mary showed them a peek of the brand tattooed on her chest. At Dean’s incredulous look, Sam smirked and showed them his own.

“My eighteenth birthday present,” he said.

“I think we should start talking preparations,” said Mary, back straight and eyes sharp, her tone reminding Dean of his commanding officer in Afghanistan.

  
  


Five hours later, they had a plan. They had decided to act as soon as possible, but they couldn’t risk fighting the demon in a suburban neighborhood. Mary knew a location, not far from Lawrence, an abandoned house which was once haunted and now served as an occasional safe-house for hunters. They would be leaving later that night to prepare.

Sam and Dean volunteered to go shopping for the supplies they needed, and go get some weapons, ammunition and herbs from John’s storage unit. They spent an hour and a half going through the list without talking much, and when they had finished, Dean bought a few beers and asked Sam if they could make a short detour before returning.

He drove them a little way out of town, to a spot where he and Tommy used to go when they were skipping class, in his junior year of high school. He sat down on the Impala’s hood, his back against the windshield, and opened a beer. After a moment’s hesitation, Sam joined him. They remained in silence for a time, watching the surrounding fields and listening to the slow twilight sounds, the crickets chirping. The stars were beginning to appear in the violet sky. Both were trying to process the events of the last days, and the reluctant feeling of hope surging within them.

“So you grew up here,” Sam muttered, breaking the silence tentatively.

“Yeah,” said Dean.

“It’s a nice place,” said Sam.

“I guess.”

Dean looked at him from the corner of his eye. “What about you? Where did you grow up?” he asked.

Sam sighed. “All over the place. We moved around a lot. Never stayed in a town for longer than six months, I think.”

“Oh. So what was your favorite place?” Dean asked.

Sam thought about it for a few moments. “I don’t know. After a while I stopped caring about the place itself. But I guess, well, California was nice, living near the beach… and there was a small town in Minnesota when I was a kid, with a lake and forests.”

“Sounds pretty,” Dean said.

“Yeah. Once I convinced Mom to go fishing…” Sam said, lost in his memories.

Dean was silent for a while. And then he bumped Sam in the shoulder. “So, tell me, do you have a girlfriend?” he said, with a little grin and raised eyebrows. Sam huffed in response.

“Boyfriend?” asked Dean, still grinning but his voice a bit unsure.

Sam shook his head. “Not really. This lifestyle isn't suited to going steady, what with moving around and lying to people all the time,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Dean, suddenly quiet.

Sam tried to rescue the conversation, grinning at Dean and bumping his shoulder. “What about you?”

Dean shot him a confident, devil-may-care look. “Nah. I’m a ladies’ man.” After a pause he said, in a quieter tone, “I used to have a high school sweetheart. Cindy. But she went off to college, and then I went off to war. Nothing steady since then.”

“I had a girlfriend in my senior year of high school. Went to prom and everything. And all that time, she had been possessed by a demon. Mom, she… well, the girl ended up in the hospital. She could hardly remember who I was,” said Sam, slowly.

“Shit,” said Dean.

“Yeah. I haven't quite been able to date someone after that.”

The last traces of lightness erased from the moment, Dean sighed deeply and bumped the back of his head against the windshield. “So this whole thing with the demons…” he started to say.

“Yeah. I know. It sounds crazy. I wish it were just that. But I’ve seen things…” said Sam.

“Well, yeah, but apart from that, what I meant is, _why_? Why you, in particular? Why bother with deals and unknown rituals in the nursery and following you around the country?” asked Dean.

“It’s not just me. You heard Mom. There were other kids too, who knows how many that we don’t know about.”

Dean was silent for a few minutes, contemplating the wide expanse of sky above them. “Have any of them ever… saved your life?” he asked, voice low.

“Huh? What?” asked Sam.

“I mean, have any of those demons you talked about… have they ever interfered to save your life?” asked Dean.

“No. Not that I’m aware of, at least. What’s this all about?” Sam asked.

Dean took a few deep breaths, composing himself. Before he could start speaking, Sam glanced at his watch.

“Shit! Dean, have you seen the time? We should be getting back, Mom’ll get sick with worry,” he said, moving off the hood and opening the passenger side door. Sighing, Dean followed him, feeling simultaneous pangs of relief and apprehension.

  
  
After a few intense hours of planning and strategizing, Mary took a moment to relax. She took a shower, still feeling out of place in her old house. Her whole body was alight with the feeling that it would all end soon, a tight anticipation in her gut.

She had never really thought she'd come back. She had dreamed about it, secretly longed for it, but as the years passed, the possibility of ever returning to the home she left behind became more and more unreal. When she and John had arrived yesterday, and she went around the house placing salt lines on the windows, drawing devil's traps in the floors or the ceiling, she could very dimly recall the moments of a previous life where she'd walked through those rooms, cleaning, playing with her children, talking with her husband.

Still wrapped in a towel, she stepped out of the bathroom and looked into the nursery. She knew that besides the old cradle there were a few boxes with her old things in it. She turned on the light and rummaged through them, curious. She felt a pang of regret as she went through her possessions of another life - cookbooks, shoes, dresses. She hadn’t worn a dress in _decades_. Dresses were pretty but they weren’t good for the cold, for running or fighting. Smiling a little bit in delight, she recovered a red dress she had bought a little after giving birth to Sam. In an impulsive, idle moment, she slipped it over her head. It was looser on her than when she’d bought it, but it still fit. She went back to the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror.

Her face was no longer that of a young woman. Her blonde hair was paler now, flecked with strands of grey. Her face was lined with years of harsh living and hard work. And yet in that moment, tired and old as she was, she saw herself as beautiful. For the first time in years, she allowed herself to hope, to dream, to want. They would get through this. They'd summon the demon and kill it, and they would be free. They could be a family again. She could see it clearly now: the first light of hope she’d seen in a very long time.

When she went downstairs, she was still wearing the red dress, along with some practical boots. It wasn’t the most fashionable combination, but she just wanted to wear the dress for a while longer. John was sitting in a kitchen chair, playing idly with Mary’s dagger. He whistled when he saw her, and grinned.

She smiled at him, feeling a little bit giddy. She had been surprised to find that the spark between them hadn’t disappeared, after all those years. Sam and Dean still hadn’t come back - perhaps she could sneak in a few minutes alone with John. She felt a wave of anticipation, desire long neglected, roll over her body, head to toes. She sat in his lap and felt his big hands closing over her waist.

“Well… this looks _fun_ ,” said John, and looked up at her with glowing yellow eyes.

Mary froze for a split-second, and dove for the dagger on the kitchen table, but it was too late - she was thrown across the room, crashing on the kitchen counter, glasses shattering under her.

She got up instantly, trying to make a run for it, but an invisible force choked her and pinned her against the wall. The yellow-eyed demon smiled brightly at her, with John’s cheery smile, just as she remembered.

Trapped, unable to move, she was only able to look on in disbelief, as she mouthed the words, “How…?”

The demon smiled slyly. “Oh it wasn’t easy. But I’m so much older and more powerful than the demons you’re used to chasing. I’ve got tricks you can’t even imagine. Holy water doesn’t really work with me, and salt stings, but it’s little more than a condiment. A little prevision against exorcisms, and bam! There you go. And the best thing? I hid so deep inside, John did not even suspect I was there. He did all the work for me. No need for acting,” he said, grinning.

Mary glanced at the devil’s trap under the kitchen doormat, and the demon followed her gaze, and winked. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it, but Mary was suddenly, terrible sure that it had a minor sliver of paint stripped off… as did all the other traps around the house.

She had fallen into his trap, she realized with a wave of despair. The demon saw it in her eyes and his smile got wider, his eyes shining with dark delight.

“Yes, Mary. Happy anniversary, dear! You do know what day this is, right? You abandoned your family twenty-two years ago. Congratulations! Sammy has grown so big, hasn't he? Big, strong, clever, and deadly. He's definitely my favorite now.”

Mary shook furiously against her bonds, snarling.

Azazel watched her with a pleasant smile on John’s face. “Now, now, no need to get panicked. I might have been exaggerating when I told you that I would come for your baby. When the time is right, he will come to me. You did your job well enough, raising him strong and smart and isolated. He just needs a bit more rage and he’ll be ready to go…”

A cold fear ran through Mary. And on its heels there was a pure boiling anger at the demon standing in front of her, that had manipulated her for his own purposes, played with her like a cat with a mouse, that was threatening _her son_.

With an interested, curious smile, Azazel picked up the dagger and looked at it. “This was very surprising,” he told Mary in a conversational tone. “I was so disappointed that you didn’t find the Colt. I never thought you had the imagination, or the guts, to actually make your own weapon.”

 _If I could only distract him enough to relax his grip_ , Mary thought, furiously. But when she tried to speak, her voice was gone.

The demon put his finger against his mouth in a shushing gesture, and appeared to listen. His smile got wider, almost manic.

“Ah. Cavalry’s coming. Show’s about to start. This is my favorite part.”

Without warning, Mary felt herself sliding up along the wall, until she was pinned against the ceiling. She went struggling all the way, mouth contorted in a grimace of rage, tears flowing down her eyes, mouth open in a muted scream.

Azazel smiled up at her.

“I always knew you'd die fighting,” he said, and Mary felt a blooming pain in her abdomen, like she was being ripped apart from the inside. Blood pooled in her throat, dribbling through her teeth.

The kitchen door opened with a bang, and Dean entered, gun cocked. He was not ready for what he found inside, though. Shocked, he looked at his father grinning at him with yellow eyes and he looked up to see his mother pinned to the ceiling, blood dripping from her stomach. Mary screamed at him to run, to leave, but her voice was gone.

In that moment, Sam barreled into the kitchen from the living room, straight into the possessed John, smashing him against the kitchen table. Sam gripped the hand holding the dagger and squeezed, and the demon dropped it onto the floor, but promptly kicked it away. With a snarl, the demon gestured with his hand, and Sam was smashed against the wall with a terrible force. He looked angry, for the first time.

“I am the one who gave them to you! You can’t use your powers against me!” the demon hissed.

Sam stood up, woozy but stubborn, but before he could move he was slammed and pinned against the wall.

“Stay there and watch-” the demon started to say, but he was interrupted by the dagger against his throat. Dean held it, eyes shocked and still disbelieving, but gripping the dagger with a steady hand.

“Let them go. _Right now_ ,” he said.

The demon smiled and turned to look at him. “Can you do it, Dean? Can you kill your own father, the man who raised you all on his own? He’s still in here. So scared for you. _Not Dean, not Dean_ , he keeps saying. If I snap your neck right now, he’ll never forgive himself,” the thing with yellow eyes and his father’s face told him, with a little self-satisfied smile. Dean tried not to let his feelings show, steeled his face, and pressed the dagger deeper into the flesh of his father’s neck.

“Let them go,” he repeated.

The demon seemed unaffected. “What do you say, Mary? Shall I let you watch your son die as you burn?” the demon asked conversationally, looking up at Mary.

Flames erupted around her, like a firebomb exploding in the ceiling, starting to spread to the whole room, and Sam screamed like a wounded animal. Mary looked at him and mouthed, _I’m sorry_.

Dean gasped at the hellish spectacle unfolding in his own kitchen. The demon deftly took the dagger from his nerveless fingers, and Dean was thrown against the wall by an invisible force.

The wind was knocked out of him for a moment, but Dean took a sharp breath and screamed. “CAS! Please, I need you! CASTIEL, I beg you, come to me!”

Azazel turned sharply to look at Dean, and hissed, “ _Shut up_.” Dean coughed up blood. Suddenly, he felt like there was a knife inside of him, chopping up his insides. It was the most painful thing he’d ever felt, more than any of his accidents, more than being shot. He couldn’t scream, he could barely breathe.

Sam watched as his mother burned up in the ceiling, still defiant and struggling, red dress floating around her. _Just like my dreams_ , he thought.

What hadn’t been in his dreams was Dean, the older brother he never knew he had, dying in front of him, or the face of the father he had just met smiling widely as he watched his family burning. Sam kept struggling madly, like a rabid animal. Moments before, when he’d attacked the demon, he’d felt an invisible force trying to stop him, and he’d pushed against it and broke through. If he could just do it one more time-

And then, in a second that seemed to last forever, John’s body jerked sharply, and John’s dark, sorrowful eyes stared out at them. John turned to Dean, something grateful and tender in his eyes, and Dean screamed as his father grasped the dagger in both hands and plunged it deep into his own chest.

Several things happened at once: John’s body convulsed as lightning lit his insides, branching out to every part of his body. There was a terrible crackling sound, and a dark cloud of smoke shot out of his mouth, but it stopped halfway through as John, still trembling madly, dug the knife in deeper. The cloud seemed to crackle, lit up from the inside with electricity, before disappearing with a bright orange glow. John collapsed on the ground.

At the same time, Sam and Dean fell forward, released from the spell keeping them captive, and Mary fell from the ceiling. Sam barely got there in time to catch her, while Dean rushed, as fast as he could manage, to his father’s side.

The fire, although started by supernatural means, was still burning in the ceiling and the walls, eating away at the kitchen curtains. Sam carried his mother out of the house before rushing back in to help Dean. He carried John as Dean walked in front of him, feeling pain with every step.

As Sam and Dean waited for the emergency services, inside the house the fire kept burning.

 

The most terrible, numbing, and painful days of Sam’s life passed in a blur. Dean fainted once they got to the hospital. His wounds were more serious than they seemed and the doctors had no logical explanation for them, and he had to undergo surgery to repair the internal damage to his organs.

John had been dead before the ambulances arrived, the dagger stabbed right through his heart. And Mary had arrived with third-degree burns all over her body, which had complicated the task of repairing the extensive and unexplainable damage to her internal organs. As the sun disappeared on the horizon on their first day in the hospital, the surgeons came to the room where Sam was waiting by Dean’s bedside.

Sam’s knees cracked on the tile with a loud snap when he heard the news. Numbly, he registered the pain, the doctors and nurses around him, trying to get him to stand up, making comforting noises, but he paid them no attention. He felt like crying and screaming until his throat was raw, he felt like taking a gun to his head, he felt like breaking something. He did none of that. Day and night, he kept watch by Dean’s bedside, Mary’s dagger clean and hidden in his ankle strap.

It was he who gave Dean the news, when he had emerged from his last surgery and was conscious for more than a few minutes at a time. Dean turned his head around and tried to hide his sobs, and Sam stepped away from the bed, giving him some privacy.

In addition to his grief, Sam had to deal with the police, who were very interested in how the fire started and how John had gotten himself stabbed. His voice choking with pain, Sam had placed the blame on his mother, an unstable woman who had kidnapped him and ran away when he was a baby, and had recently returned to the home. An argument had turned into a violent, physical fight, and before Sam or Dean could stop her, Mary had stabbed John and set herself on fire. It didn’t explain everything, of course, and the police officers had looked at him like they suspected him of hiding something. Not that they would believe the truth, either.

  
  


Sam had wanted a hunter’s salt-and-burn. Dean had wanted a burial, two headstones side by side, so his father could rest beside the woman he’d spent half his life searching for. In the end, they compromised on a cremation and burying the ashes together under a single tombstone in the local cemetery. There was a strange, informal kind of funeral. Missouri Moseley recited some prayers, and Tommy Jones, who came down from his post to visit for a day, prayed along with her. Bobby Singer and the Harvelles, Bill in his wheelchair, sat in silence, and poured a measure of whisky over the soft earth. Ellen Harvelle hugged Sam and Dean and promised they would be welcome at her place anytime, which surprised Sam a little bit. Everyone offered help and condolences, and didn’t question the official story that Sam kept repeating.

Afterwards, Dean had driven them to the half-burnt, damaged house, and locked himself up in the garage. He drank a whole bottle of whisky and proceeded to take a tire iron to the Impala, breaking the glass, cracking the paint over the sleek body, leaving deep gashes and dents. He screamed himself hoarse, destroying his beautiful car, not even caring. His stitches broke, his hip and leg were aching, but he welcomed the pain.

Finally he fell to his knees, in a bitter parody of a prayer, and sobbed.

“You _fucker_. Can you hear me, Cas? _Why?_ I never asked for your miracles. I never asked you for anything! Where _were_ you? I’ve never prayed in my life, but by God, I was praying then, and where _were_ you? You know what, if you’re listening to this: _fuck you_!”

He threw the empty whisky bottle in a fit of fury, where it shattered against the wall. He was silent after that, as he wept with his forehead against the cold floor.

Upstairs, in the nursery, Sam sat in the corner and wept until his chest hurt with each sob and the tears burned as they rolled down his face. There was grief, and rage, and above all a terrible frustration. His relationship with his mother had never been less than complicated, and when he realized what she’d done… He’d always known she must have had a family before she started her hunt. But he’d imagined a father murdered at the hands of a demon, a revenge-thirsty werewolf or any other monster. Sometimes as a teenager he'd imagined an abusive, alcoholic husband, beating Mary every other night, and hated that imaginary man. But when he met them face to face, the people Mary had abandoned, everything had changed. He’d never imagined a devoted father who would spend years searching for his lost wife and son, nor an older brother to grow up with, who’d protect him and tease him and teach him how to beat Nintendo games.

He hated the fact that Mary had taken that away from him. And most of all, he hated the fact that she was dead, because it meant he could no longer hate her, scream to her about it, hold a grudge and have the possibility of giving forgiveness.

There was no longer the hope of making things right, of getting back the life that had been stolen from him. From them.

There was only silence.

  
  


Dean arranged for the house to be sold, as it was. He took a few weeks to recover from his wounds and to fix the Impala again, in his dad’s old shop. Sam helped him clear out the house and sell whatever could be sold, giving away the rest. There was a small box of old photographs that Dean decided to keep. The rest, he could leave behind. Sam sold Mary’s Honda to a second-hand car dealer. He didn’t care if he’d need it or not. It had been Mary’s rule, anyway, to change cars every few years, changing them as easily as they moved house.

Finally, the day came when they both had little more than two packed duffel bags and a car between them. They drove out of town in the morning, to the spot where they had sat together, not too long ago. Sam got out of the car and smelled the crisp air, already colder than it had when they first arrived in Lawrence.

“So,” he said, not looking at Dean, “what are you going to do? Hollywood, chasing the dream? Back to war?”

Dean shrugged. “What are _you_ going to do?” he asked.

Sam sighed. “Mom kept copies of her research in a cabin up in Michigan. I’m thinking about going up there, checking if there’s any loose ends that need tying up. Something tells me this won’t be over so easily,” he said.

“Don’t you want… you know? To go back to college, forget about all this, live out your life as a normal person?” Dean asked, hesitantly.

“I’m not a normal person,” Sam replied, still looking out at the horizon, the endless blue skies and meadows around them. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be. Maybe in a few years I’ll get tired and quit. Right now, I just can’t... I can’t turn my back on this. This is how I was raised. This is what I’m good at.”

“Hunting monsters?”

“Yeah. Killing things. Saving people. All pain, no pay. The family business,” Sam said, with a wry smile.

“Sounds shitty, but what the hell. I’m in,” said Dean. Sam turned to look at him.

“Don’t _you_ want… you know, a normal life?” Sam asked.

“I... I know we’re little more than strangers, really, but… Well, I still remember having a baby brother, and Mom telling me that now that I was the oldest I had to take care of Sammy, and I think I used to kiss you goodnight, and- what I mean is… there’s only the two of us now. As long as you’re out there, facing demons and God-knows-what-else, you’ll need somebody to watch your back. And I, well. As long as you want me to, I’m not going anywhere,” Dean said.

Sam looked at Dean for a long moment. Dean stared back, a bit uncomfortably. For the first time, Sam saw his mother’s eyes in Dean’s green eyes, the curve of her mouth in Dean’s, her cheekbones in his. He smiled. It was a soft, quiet, sad smile, but it still made Dean smile back.

“Okay,” said Sam, and a bit uncertainly, he stepped up to his older brother and hugged him. Dean returned the embrace just as softly. Closing his eyes, Sam let himself feel a little bit at home. 


	7. Epilogue

 

For the first time in a life that encompassed many human generations, the angel Castiel was doubting.

The new orders he had received upon retrieving Dean from Afghanistan were very clear and explicit, as opposed to the previous ones.

_You are not to interfere in any form or manner in the fates of the Winchester family. No matter what happens, what tragedies befall them or what fate awaits the person you were commissioned to protect, you are not to interfere. You will keep watching and delivering your timely reports but you are not to interact with any of them. On the pain of **losing your grace**. Any disobedience will be summarily punished._

_Yes, sir_ , Castiel had answered, unwavering and firm.

But inside, he asked himself: Why were the higher ups so interested in this family, in Dean? He had no special aura or extraordinary abilities. And why, after half a lifetime of allowing him any measures, any vessels necessary, were they now forbidding him any interaction or interference? Apparently the demons had some sort of plan involving the younger brother. Demons and angels watching the same family? It was ominous.

As he continued watching his charge, he couldn’t help feeling a dreadful sense of loss. The only thing Dean had ever asked of him, he could not give. He knew that final prayer was the last Dean would ever utter. He still remembered Dean as a child, when he was first assigned as his protector. Such a sad and lonely child, believing himself unworthy of love. Even back then, when Castiel hadn't understood humanity as well as he did now, he had felt something stirring in him at the sight of the boy. Pity. Compassion. Empathy.

After years of taking different vessels, Castiel understood humans much better than he had thought possible. Each vessel shared his or her emotions, memories, and incongruities. For the brief moments that he had touched their lives, they had touched his as well. They had confused him at first, but now he treasured them: Sister Rachel’s love of soap operas and fear of men, old George’s memories of his wife, the good times and the bad merging into a single sweet moment, Anna’s devotion to her parents and her hunger for imagined adventures, Jose’s dedication to helping others and his constant feeling of inferiority.

These were his Father’s children, and was it not his mission as an angel to protect them and guide them, to watch over them as an older brother might care for a younger sibling?

He could not deny that his protective instinct was much stronger in Dean’s case, after watching him for practically his whole life. It was only now that he was realizing – maybe it was his own side he had to protect him from. Whatever plan the higher-ups had in store for Dean, he was suddenly doubting that it would be good for him. After all, there were many angels who wouldn't hesitate at killing an innocent to save thousands.

Castiel suddenly, conflictingly, realized that he wanted to protect Dean above all others. If he had to - if it was necessary - even from his own people.


End file.
